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IMMORTALITY 


L fal 
NrAS Gh aie 


_ 
\ 





IMMORTALITY 


BY 
Sm FLINDERS PETRIE, D.C.L., Litt.D., Ph.D. 
Dr. F. M. CORNFORD, LL.D. 
Pror. A. A. MACDONELL, Ph.D. 
Pror. ADAM C. WELCH, D.D. 
Pror. R. G. MACINTYRE, D.D. 
Pror. RUDOLF EUCKEN, D.D., Ph.D. 
PrincipaL G. GALLOWAY, D.Phil., D.D. 
Rev. Canon E. W. BARNES, D.Sc., F.R.S. 
Mr. MAURICE HEWLETT 


With an Introduction by 
THE Ricur HonorasLeE LORD ERNLE. 


_ Edited by 
Rev. Sm JAMES MARCHANT, K.B.E., LL.D. 


G.P. Putnam's Sons 
New York & London 
The Rnickerbocker Press 
1924 


Copyright, 1924 
by 
G. P. Putnam’s Sons 





Made in the United States of America 


INTRODUCTION 
By The Right Honble. Lorp ERNLE 


“Ir men die, shall they cease to live?’’ There 
is no other question that has stirred human 
hearts so deeply, for so long a period, over 
such vast spaces of the habitable globe. More 
than ten thousand years ago it was asked of 
ancient Egypt and she made answer that im- 
mortality was an axiom of life. From the 
earliest literature of the Aryan-speaking race, 
comes a reply which in effect is similar. In the 
primitive philosophy of almost all the savage 
races of which we have any knowledge appears a 
belief in the distinction between the human body 
and the soul which gives it individual life and 
character, and in the continued spiritual exist- 
ence of this personal self apart from the body 
which it has animated. No religion, whether it 
be of one God, or of many, or of none, has swayed 
great masses of mankind, unless it has met the 
question; and all are agreed that the soul survives 
death. 

In an agreement so wide-spread and deep- 


Vv 


vi Introduction 


rooted, men have sought a proof of the truth of 
the belief in the survival of the soul. Though to 
hundreds of millions of men the belief brings 
only misery, they cannot escape its domination. 
The Hindu and the Buddhist place their highest 
happiness in the final extinction of individual 
consciousness. ‘Their creed offers them every 
temptation to believe that death 1s the gate, not 
of life, but, as it appears to be, of non-existence. 
Yet, in spite of appearances, and even of prob- 
abilities, that this life is all, in spite also of all the 
miseries that their form of belief involves, 
neither can rid himself of the conviction that 
individual life is not extinguished in the grave. 
The evidence of those who dread the continuance 
of consciousness, yet still believe it to be true, is 
almost more telling than the evidence of those 
who crave it as a boon. Yet, as strict proof 
of the truth of the belief, neither the desire nor 
the dread, nor the two in combination, are of 
avail. The conviction of immortality is not so 
universal that it can be called a natural instinct 
of humanity. There have always been many to 
whom the survival of the individual soul has 
seemed a delusion. At the most, the prevalence 
and persistence of the belief are striking facts in 
the mental history of mankind. They are 
nothing more. 

As to the continued life of the individual soul, 


Introduction vii 


there is approach to unanimity. But, on the 
form, nature and quality of that future existence 
there is wide disagreement. Mysteries so pro- 
found, and of such universal concern, have 
stimulated human speculation, and imaginative 
ingenuity has dreamed dreams and seen visions, 
some beautiful, some grotesque and horrible, 
some material, some spiritual, which have been 
accepted as articles of faith. In some of the 
chapters that follow these prefatory lines, are 
traced variations in the beliefs of four of the 
principal peoples whose thought has most power- 
fully influenced the religious life of the world. 
Here, both at the moment when Christ “brought 
life and immortality to light by the gospel,”’ and 
in the subsequent period, when doctrinal Christ- 
ianity was taking shape, may be collected the 
common stock of contemporary ideas on the life 
of the soul after death. In other chapters, 
are discussed the development of Christian 
doctrines, the ethical basis of the hope, the testi- 
mony of poets, the judgment of philosophy, and 
the attitude of science. 

The book will, it is hoped, prove not only to be 
of interest and value but to meet a real need 
which is widely felt. During the past seventy 
years, the attitude of thought towards religious 
questions, and the materials on which thought is 
exercised, have profoundly changed. Subjects 


Vili Introduction 


which by common consent were beyond the pale 
of discussion are now discussed with freedom. 
In 1850, it was a courageous act to question 
details of orthodox Christianity; to-day, in 
certain circles, courage is needed for their de- 
fence. There are, no doubt, multitudes whose 
faith in Revelation as a final authority, and in 
the Resurrection as a historical fact, is still so 
strong and unhesitating that their hope of 
immortality is “sure and certain.” But it 
would be worse than idle to pretend that all men 
stand, or are able to stand, on the same firm 
ground. The rapid conquest of new fields of 
knowledge, the triumphal progress of the dis- 
coveries of science, the methods of scientific 
inquiry, have disturbed the beliefs of many. 
They fear; they doubt: they hesitate to found 
their faith on a synthesis that has not been, and 
cannot be, scientifically proved. They ask 
anxiously whether science has demonstrated the 
falsity of their hope in the continuity of the 
existence of the personal self beyond the grave; 
whether there are fallacies in the absolute philo- 
sophy which finds for it no place, whether meta- 
physics or ethics rejects its possibility. On all 
these and similar points they will find an answer 
in this volume from masters of their respective 
subjects. No cogent proof can be offered either 
of the truth or of the falsity of the hope in im- 


Introduction ix 


mortality. But the central point on which the 
essays converge is that, it is not only a possible 
truth, but the object of a reasonable faith such as 
that on which men act in all practical affairs, 
and the most adequate interpretation of the 
ethical and spiritual values of the life of mankind. 

Human hearts will always have reasons of 
which reason knows nothing. But the belief in 
immortality ultimately rests on the truth of the 
belief in the government of the Universe by one 
supreme, moral and spiritual Being. Happy are 
those whose faith on this point has survived the 
shock of recent years, and not the least part of 
their happiness lies in the “sure and certain 
hope”’ of a future life. For those who have lost 
that faith, no discoveries of science can restore 
the inspiration of a hope which owes not a little 
of its uplifting beauty to its very vagueness. 
The boon that they desire is not immortality, 
but non-existence. 


ERNLE. 
March 11, 1924. 





CONTENTS 


PAGE 
EcyptT1an CONCEPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY . ' 3 


By Sir Furpers Perriz, D.C.L., Litt.D., F.R.S. 
(Edwards Professor of Egyptology, University of 
London). 


~ GREEK VIEWS OF IMMORTALITY : 19 


By F. M. Cornrorp, M.A. (Fellow of Trinity 
College, Cambridge). 


IMMORTALITY IN INDIAN THOUGHT . : 46 


By A. A. Macponeti, Ph.D. (Boden Professor of 
Sanskrit, Oxford University). 


w HEBREW AND APOCALYPTIC CONCEPTIONS OF Im- 
MORTALITY . % . f t 4 69 


By Apamu C. Wetcu, D.D. (Professor of Hebrew and 
Old Testament Exegesis, Edinburgh). 


~ THe CHRISTIAN IDEA or IwwoRTALITY { ; 93 


By Ronatp G. Macintyre, M.A., D.D. (Professor, 
Sytematic Theology, St. Andrew’s College, University 
of Sydney). 


Tue PuHILosopuy OF IMMORTALITY . : RS 1) Arg 


By Grorce Gattoway, D.Phil., D.D. (Principal of 
St. Mary’s College, University of St. Andrew’s). 


Tue Eruicat Basis or IMMORTALITY : . 144 


By Rupo.F EvckKEn, D.D., Ph.D. 
xi 


xil Contents 


PAGE 
SCIENCE AND IMMORTALITY , Y i Lied Cie 
By Rev. Canon E. W. Barnss, Sce.D.,F.RS. 


IMMORTALITY IN THE Ports . } CWT eal OS 
By Maovrice H. Hewett. 


Immortality 


RY 
ay 
tee 
\ iA 


wi ‘ a 
Wel G5) ¥\\ } 





Egyptian Conceptions of Immortality 


Sir FLINDERS PETRIE, D.C.L., Litt.D., F.R.S. 
Edwards Professor of Egyptology, University of London. 


To the Egyptian, immortality was an axiom of 
life. In the earliest graves that we know, there 
is provision for the future. In the deepest pes- 
simism the Egyptian looked on death like the 
going forth into a garden after illness, or return- 
ing to his house after captivity. There was no 
possible question to his mind as to the fact of 
immortality, however varied and contradictory 
might be his many beliefs about the conditions 
of it. Notwithstanding his fleshly—though 
decent—life, he had a strongly spiritual nature. 
He recognised the ancestral spirit (ka) as per- 
vading his being, probably as the formative 
principle; it was to this ancestral spirit that he 
was rejoined when he was gathered to his fathers. 
He also recognised the illumination (aakhu) or 
intelligence, which enlightened him. A name 
was essential to him, as well as to everything 
else, without which nothing really existed. His 
3 


4 Immortality 


soul (ba) was thought of after death as a human- 
headed bird, which could fly in and out of the 
tomb. All of these were separate from his 
material body (sahu) for the preservation of 
which the tomb was built. It seems likely that 
as we can trace the various gods and incongruous 
beliefs to different races that entered the country, 
so the idea of these various spiritual elements of 
man were due to the mixture of races. Probably 
the ba belongs to the oldest stratum, the ka to 
the Osiris worshippers, and the aakhu to the 
followers of Ra. 

In the prehistoric graves there is elaborate 
provision of clothing, food, and weapons; in the 
second civilisation games were often provided. 
There was a regular ritual for the dead: the 
principal jars of food and drink are placed in 
constant positions. Further back, even, can be 
traced the belief in crossing the water of death 
to the next world; the dead person is supposed 
to pass over on reed floats, even the king had 
not a boat, and yet boats were known early in 
the first civilisation. This reliance on floats 
must have come from a time before any of the 
civilisation that we can trace in prehistoric ages. 

A belief which was certainly very early was 
that of the soul wandering about the cemetery 
seeking food. This is connected with the repre- 
sentation of the soul as a human-headed bird. 


Egyptian Conceptions of Immortality 5 


Down to late times there are figures of the god- 
dess in the sycamore-fig tree giving food and 
drink to the soul. This was not only a symbol 
of spiritual sustenance, for actual offerings of 
food were made at the grave, and even continue 
to be made in some form down to the present 
time. 

All these views are evidently older than the 
earliest fragment of ritual which is preserved. 
In that, the ideal of the future life is the asso- 
ciation with the sky-goddess. This deity was 
appealed to (1) by her vitality to give life to the 
dead, (2) by her ruling powers to protect the 
dead, (3) by her control of all things to give a 
place to the dead among the circumpolar stars 
that never set, and so are immortal, (4) by her 
guidance of the gods who travel through the 
sky, to guard the dead likewise from wandering 
and being lost. 

There is a further and grosser idea which also 
belongs to the earliest ages, that of capturing 
and eating a god to acquire his divine qualities. 
The dead “‘eat men and live on gods”’; the power- 
ful kings “‘eat their charms and devour their 
souls; the great ones are the morning meal, the 
middle ones are the evening meal, the little ones 
are the night portion.” All this obviously comes 
down from the ages before Osiris reclaimed the 
Egyptians from cannibalism and taught them 


6 Immortality 


agriculture. Yet how familiar still are these 
earliest ideas of the waters of death, the life in 
the sky, and the material theophagy; ten thou- 
sand years have not obliterated them from 
popular conceptions. 

The next great stage was due to the civilisation 
that came in with the Osiris worship, probably 
from the West. The primitive conception of 
bliss was the being in the company of the gods: 
we shall see this continually mentioned also in 
later times. In order to enjoy this blessing it 
became obvious to the moral sense that some 
scrutiny was necessary, as in any earthly court. 
For this the actions during life must be con- 
sidered and appraised: hence arose a judgment 
before Osiris, with other gods as assessors. 
This enforced the idea of a moral standard, and 
of falling below that standard. Hence the next 
stage was the appeal to the four sons of Horus, 
‘Salutations to you, Lords of righteousness, the 
company behind Osiris, causing to cut away sins, 
behold ye me, I come to you, extinguish all sins 
belonging to me.” Here sin is recognised as a 
bar to the fellowship with the gods; yet the dead 
can be purged from it by invocation of the 
assessor gods. We cannot say when this idea 
was accepted, or how soon this train of conse- 
quent beliefs grew up. Certainly the use of a 
definite moral code was very early, as the repu- 


Egyptian Conceptions of Immortality 7 


diation of sins entirely ignores duties to wife or 
family, or any sexual limitations apart from 
profanation of temples by licence. This code 
was arranged in groups of five related sins, evi- 
dently for the sake of finger-counting as an aid 
to memory. Ina primitive dialogue between the 
dead and the celestial ferryman over the waters 
of death, the ferryman demands, “Can you count 
your fingers?” apparently the popular term for 
knowing the moral code. 

All of these ideas belong to the Osiris beliefs 
which were the religion of the first prehistoric 
age, about 8,000—7,000 B.c. according to the 
Egyptians. The Osiris tribes on entering Egypt 
partly mixed with, and partly fought, the Set- 
worshipping tribes, which seem to have come up 
the Red Sea coast. From the habit of the people 
there of living in huts raised on trees, and going 
up to them by a ladder (as in Central Africa now) 
it was natural to adopt the imagery of going up 
to heaven by a ladder, and Set was the guardian 
of the Heavenly ladder. This could only arise 
when the ideas of the Somali home of those 
tribes were still vividly in mind, and must belong 
to the beginning of the prehistoric civilisation. 
So far, we have been dealing with an age far 
before any written documents, of which only 
gleanings can be learned from fragments of 
ritual, which carry their primitive character in 


8 Immortality 


their internal features. Yet we see how ten 
thousand years ago most of the moral elements 
of a belief in immortality were already accepted. 

The next great ehange was the eastern influ- 
ence of the Second Prehistoric age, which 
brought in the worship of the sun-god Ra. Here 
the imagery of an earthly court and kingdom 
belonging to Osiris was dropped, and the future 
life was regarded as the travel along with the 
company of the gods in the boat of the sun, 
across the heavens by day, and through the 
hours of darkness in the night. 

We pass now from what we can infer from 
later documents and arrive at the direct state- 
ments of the earliest inscriptions. These are 
preserved on amulets for the dead, in the form 
of cylinders which are doubtless due to the 
Mesopotamian source of the dynastic race. On 
these the principal wish is to be like a god, or 
united to a god: less often there are prayers for 
food or protection. In the first dynasty there is 
no reference to any offerings on the tombstones, 
which are solely occupied with name and titles. 
By the third dynasty, the prayers for all ma- 
terial requirements are fully set out—cattle, 
food, drink, incense, and clothing are all speci- 
fied. This system was extended until in the 
fifth and sixth dynasties the lists extend to 
nearly a hundred items. These are divided into 


Egyptian Conceptions of Immortality 9 


the order of daily service: washing, incense, and 
anointing on rising, then clothing; offerings to 
the gods: a light meal, followed by mouth- 
washing; a heavy meal during the day; lastly 
the evening meal, mainly of fruit and wine. 
These manual acts of the service would be per- 
formed on the statue of the deceased person, 
for the refreshment of his soul, as the priests 
performed them for the statues of the gods. 
The food would be set before the statue, and 
(it is to be presumed) was finally consumed by 
the officiant. It is clear that all this system goes 
back to the primitive belief in the soul dwelling 
in and near the tomb, and needing to be nour- 
ished there. There is no trace of the Osirian 
future life, or of the protection by Ra: the 
Egyptian in the early dynasties had slipped out 
of all the mythology which had been planted 
upon him by invading races, and was back on 
to the most primitive notions of the wandering 
soul. This is much like taking up to-day Le 
Braz’ Night of Fires, and feeling that one might 
slip back naturally into the pre-Christian service 
of the dead which still lasts in Brittany. 

The tomb was the real home of the dead, where 
the soul wandered in and out, going down to 
the body below, and then out, as the ba bird. 
It passed by a narrow slit in the brick front of 
the tomb, or by a reed buried upright to lead 


10 Immortality 


to the outer air, or by a long square channel 
through the mass of a pyramid, or by a little 
hole in the rock between the sepulchre and the 
offering place. The actual offering of food was 
found to decay, so models of food were placed 
in the tomb; these models were then transferred 
in high relief to the walls; then simplified, until 
only a painted figure of the food remains. Simi- 
larly all the possessions of a man were trans- 
ferred in figure to the tomb; he was sculptured 
standing, beholding all his servants and farm 
and property, from the desert down to the Nile. 
Thus his soul could enjoy again all his former 
wealth. The poor, who could not afford such 
costly works, provided a pottery tray with a 
model tank and images of food offerings piled 
beside it. This was placed at the mouth of the 
grave: then the thought of the soul shivering 
in the night wind, prompted the making of a 
shelter for it. The stretched out Bedawy tent 
was changed to a little hut; this became a 
portico; then a chamber behind the portico 
appeared; more chambers followed; a stairway 
up to a second floor was added; models of chairs 
and couches, water jars and stands, the grinding 
stones, and a woman grinding corn; thus at last 
a complete model of a countryman’s home sup- 
plied earthly comfort to the soul. 

The Egyptian never seems to have had the 


Egyptian Conceptions of Immortality 11 


dread of the return of the soul, often observed in 
other lands. The dead were usually furnished 
with weapons, and there was continual connec- 
tion kept up with the tomb. In the prehistoric 
times the head was in many cases removed from 
the body, and replaced much later. This can 
only be akin to the present African custom of 
preserving the head in the house, and placing 
food before it at all the family festivals, thus 
keeping up the unity of the family as long as 
possible. The provision of the model houses by 
the grave was therefore a pious help, and not a 
means of detaining the soul in the cemetery. 
The dominance of the worship of Ra under the 
fifth dynasty had its effect on the belief in the 
future. To live under the protection of Ra it 
was needful to enter the boat of the sun. Just as 
a model head or foot was placed with the body, 
as a charm to ensure the use of hands or feet, 
so a model boat was placed along with earlier 
kinds of servant-models, in order to give the 
dead the power of intercepting the sun boat on 
the water. It is surprising that, in spite of seeing 
all light come from the sun, the Egyptian had 
the perverse idea of the sun going into darkness 
as it set. The dead who accompanied the sun 
also therefore went into the dark. The suc- 
cessive hours being divisions of the night must 
have gateways, through which the soul had to 


12 Immortality 


pass; and gates must have gatekeepers, so 
demons which guarded the gates had to be 
appeased to let the souls through. All this was 
a ghastly misapplication of logic, but became a 
leading idea of the future life m the later ages 
of the Pharaohs. 

The kingdom of Osiris was the most Castine 
idea in the eighteenth to twentieth dynasties. 
In that was a complete copy of earthly life. 
The ploughing and sowing, the reaping and 
threshing, filled up much of the time. They 
sailed on the streams, they sat in arbours, they 
played games; but there is no hint of sleeping 
or resting, the day seems to be eternal. On the 
contrary in the tomb equipment painted on the 
earlier coffins the head rest is continually shown, 
and it is frequent as an amulet in later times. 
The most essential idea of Osiris is as the god of 
renewed life, renewal of vegetation, and the god 
whose own life was renewed. The careful preser- 
vation of the corpse and all its organs seems to 
have no other purpose but its serving for a 
renewed life. How this was effected is never 
stated, except as a magic action, like the trans- 
formations of the dead at will into a swallow, a 
hawk, a crocodile, a phoenix, a lotus, or as various 
gods. There was thus a familiar idea of trans- 
formation, and the renewal of human life seems 
to be accepted on the same footing. 


Egyptian Conceptions of Immortality 13 


In the later ages, when Western influences were 
in contact with Egypt, the detail of the Osiris 
‘ kingdom is subdued, and there is that vague 
phrase of the dead “going to Osiris’’; the 
mummy was elaborately provided with a great 
variety of amulets to ensure its preservation, 
and to enable it to return to the functions of life. 
As many as 125 amulets have been found on one 
body, of course largely repetitions of a few forms. 
The complications of dogmatism were not ac- 
ceptable to many Egyptians. In the twelfth 
dynasty period the simplest forms of prayer or 
dedication to the “Great God’’—that is the 
local god of the district—were very usual; the 
primitive wish for the future life was commonly 
expressed in the prayer for being “with God,” 
after the list of material supplies. Far on, about 
the end of the kingdom, there is the prayer for 
“living, belonging to the Great God in the 
divine underworld.” In the revolution of Aten 
worship the formula on a heart-scarab was, “‘I 
grant thy soul to enter into the protection of 
Aten: receive thou wheat from the altar of the 
Good Being in the house of Aten.” This was 
the new version of the protection in the boat of 
Ra, and the food offerings being guaranteed by 
the gods. Just after this is found an entirely new 
prayer, not for any material benefits or susten- 
ance, but only for a “sweet heart every day.” 


14 Immortality 


The condition of the soul is felt to be the only 
thing that can be definitely asked from the god; 
how, or in what way, this will be given is left 
to the divine mercy. 

So far, the purely native monuments show the 
Egyptian beliefs. But in the Greek period there 
comes a mass of literature on the views of matter 
and of man known as the Hermetic books; from 
the historical allusions in them there is no date 
possible for their composition later than the 
Persian age, before the Alexandrine conquest. 
Some details help to fix the age of the beginning 
of this series to about 510 B.c. They represent 
Egyptian thought as influenced by India and 
Greece, but bitterly opposed to any subjection to 
Greece; and they are of the greatest value as 
showing how ideas and expressions were being 
developed, which were the common stock of the 
religious world in which Christianity was plant- 
ed. There are many accounts of the past and 
future of souls, which show more fully how the 
Egyptian minds were working. 

In the Kore-Kosmou souls are said to be 1m- 
prisoned in the body; they are promised that if 
sinless they shall dwell in the fields of Heaven, 
if they are blamable they must continue on 
earth, and if they sin worse they shall become 
animals. This is entirely transmigration; the 
final dissolution of the body provides their 


Egyptian Conceptions of Immortality 15 


return to the happiness of their first estate. 
Those who live a blameless life become kings, 
that they may thus be trained to become gods. 

In the Sermon of Isis to Horus souls at death 
are said to return to their proper region, between 
the moon and the earth. The souls pass through 
air without friction. There are four strata in 
this region, the kingly souls highest of all, and 
the base souls nearest the earth. In the Defini- 
tions of Asklepios which cannot be later than 
about 350 B.c., the sun is said to distend the 
Kosmos, affording birth to all, and when they 
fail he takes them to his arms again. Around 
him are the choirs of daimons who influence 
men: but the soul’s logos is above the control of 
daimons; and if a ray of God shines through the 
sun into the soul, the daimons have no power 
over it. In the Perfect Sermon, written before 
340 B.c., when the soul leaves the body, then 
the judgment and the weighing of merit (the old 
judgment scene before Osiris) pass into the 
power of its highest daimon (or chief guardian 
angel). If pious it is allowed to rest in fit places, 
if soiled with evil it is driven into the depth, to 
vortices of air, fire, and water, ever racked with 
ceaseless pains. Here the idea of transmigration 
has vanished, and a purgatory is substituted. 
In the last of these works, the Shepherd, sense- 
less men pass into darkness, but the good end of 


16 Immortality 


those who have gained gnosis is to be one with 
God. 

These statements about the fate of the wicked, 
though influenced by foreign ideas at that time, 
are based on older beliefs. The earliest detailed 
statement about transmigration of souls is in 
Herodotus; and although a couple of generations 
had then elapsed since Indian influence came in 
with the Persian conquest, it ts hardly likely 
that the Egyptian views would have been much 
changed by that time. Herodotus states that 
“the Egyptians were the first who asserted the 
doctrine that the soul of man is immortal, and 
that when the body perishes it enters into some 
other animal, constantly springing into existence; 
and when it has passed through the different 
kinds of terrestrial, marine, and aerial beings, it 
- again enters into the body of a man that is born; 
and that this revolution is made in three thou- 
sand years.’’ Later, Plato and Plutarch con- 
firm this. As the representations that we have 
of the judgment scene are all on papyri or tombs, 
where the justification of the dead was assumed, 
there is no first-hand information as to this 
belief before the Greek period. In the scene of 
weighing the heart there is usually a monster 
waiting, whose name is Amam, “‘the swallower’”’: 
it has the head of a crocodile, the forepart of a 
lion, and the hind-part of a hippopotamus. In 


Egyptian Conceptions of Immortality 17 


another papyrus it is called Shay, “the pig.” 
In one scene of judgment there is represented a 
pig driven away ina boat. There is no evidence 
that this monster destroyed the wicked: in 
swallowing them it may have taken the souls, 
and thus effected transmigration. Thus the 
statements of the Kore-Kosmou, 510 B.c., and 
of Herodotus about 450 B.c., may represent the 
ideas of the earlier Egyptians. By 350 B.c. 
transmigration had been effaced by the idea of 
regions of turmoil and darkness. The represen- 
tations of headless bodies, and of a lake of fire, 
in the terror of the future, are not connected 
with the fate of the sinners on earth, but declare 
the destruction of the spirit enemies met with in 
passing through the hours of the night. 

The dominant belief of the Egyptian, from 
beginning to end, was that of the certain immor- 
tality of the soul, and the future happiness in 
the company of the gods for all except the posi- 
tively wicked. Even they were to undergo 
transmigration, until they had a further chance 
of better life. The future was not in the dark- 
ness and gloom of the Babylonian or Greek or 
Roman beliefs. The description of the coming 
life was that of “Coming forth to the day.” In 
the twelfth dynasty the formula on a statuette 
is a prayer to Osiris “to grant the deceased to 
come forth, walking happily in the world of stars, 


18 Immortality 


that he may behold the sun coming forth in the 
horizon.’ In the representations of the future 
life, there is no emphasis upon any material 
pleasures: the conditions of an upright and 
honourable life on earth are simply transferred 
to a future life. How the Egyptian reconciled 
the varied notions which he inherited, we cannot 
say. The material offerings for the wanderer 
in the cemetery, the system of model offerings, 
the kingdom of Osiris, the boat of Ra, all these 
he believed in more or less together; sometimes 
one eclipsed the other, yet such continued to be 
accepted at one place or another. We know 
enough of incongruities of half-belief not to 
throw stones at the varied forms of the central 
faith in immortality, first held and ever held by 
the Egyptian. 


Greek Views of Immortality 


F. M. CornForp, M.A. 
Fellow and Lecturer, Trinity College, Cambridge. 


Au. the life with which our senses acquaint us 
is confined upon the ‘shores of light ’—the region 
of familiar sounds and colours and tangible 
things, washed by the lower air, whose clouds 
drift overhead and are caught upon the hillsides. 
Below, this zone is limited by the lifeless rocks, 
covering the common womb of living things 
and the darkness of their common grave; above, 
it is encompassed by the upper air and the fiery 
light of heaven. The tops of the highest moun- 
tains rise beyond the clouds into the tranquil 
ether. ‘Upon Olympus, they say, is the seat of 
the gods established for ever. It is not shaken 
by winds nor ever wet with rain, and the snow 
comes not nigh; but the clear air spreads with- 
out a cloud, and the white light floats over it. 
There the blessed gods take their pleasure for — 
all their days.’ ' 


* Odyssey vi, 41. 
19 


<— 


20 Immortality 


The interval, now inhabited by mortal life, 
between earth and sky did not always exist. 
There was a time when ‘heaven and earth were 
one form; but after that they had been sundered 
from one another, they gave birth to all things 
and brought them up into the light—trees, and 
winged things, and creatures that the salt sea 
breeds, and the race of mortal men.’: Life 
thus had its origin in the marriage of the sepa- 
rated parents, Father Heaven and Mother 
Earth, mediated by the rain, the seed of the Sky 
Father, or by the mythical figure of Eros, of 
Love himself, who, as A’schylus says, draws the 
holy Heaven to quicken the womb of Earth, 
and Earth to meet his embrace. ? 

The gods also, the Immortals, are children of 
this marriage. So ‘men and gods are of one 
kindred; but by difference of power we are utter- 
ly divided: man is a thing of nought, but for the 
gods the bronze floor of heaven stands as a seat 
unshaken for ever.’ The gods, indeed, are not 
eternal, for they had a beginning; but they are 
not, like man, under the dominion of time, 
change, and death. 

Fair AXgeus’ son, only to gods in heaven 


Comes no old age, nor death of anything; 
All else is turmoiled by our master Time.‘ 


« Euripides, Melanippe, frag. 484. 
2 Eschylus, Danaids, frag. 44. 3 Pindar, Nemean vi, 1. 
4 Sophocles, Edipus at Colonus, trans. Murray. 


Greek Views of Immortality 21 


To be immortal, then—to escape death—is to be 
divine: the privilege of immortality, even more 
than ‘difference of power,’ distinguishes the gods 
from man. To aspire after immortality is the 
most dangerous of all ambitions. ‘For all alike 
we die; but our destiny in life is unequal; and if 
a man lift his eyes to that which is afar off, too 
weak is he to reach the bronze floor of the gods’ 
high seat. Even so winged Pegasus flung off 
his lord, when he was fain to come unto the 
mansions of the sky and to stand, he, Bellero- 
phon, in the conclave of Zeus. For that which 
is sweet beyond lawful measure there waits an 
ending very bitter.’ ‘Mortal man may not go 
soaring to the heavens, nor seek to wed the 
Queen of Paphos or some silver-shining Nereid 
of the sea. There is a vengeance from heaven; 
happy is he that with cheerful mind weaves the 
web of one day to its end without a tear.’? 

This conception of immortality as synonym- 
ous with divinity and inaccessible to man was 
never displaced by the rival doctrine, presently 
to be considered, that man could become divine 
and immortal; it persisted in Greece from the 
age of Homer to the end of paganism. It was 
not, however, inconsistent with the almost uni- 
versal belief that some semblance of the living 


t Pindar, Isthmian vii, 42. 
2 Aleman, Parthenion i. 


22 Immortality 


man survives bodily death—that ‘there is even 
in the house of Death a spirit or a shade, though 
the wits dwell in it no more.’ * A semblance, 
indeed, rather than a part; psyche, originally the 
‘breath’ (anima), had come to mean no more 
than the ‘shadow’ or the ‘image’ (ezdolon). In 
Homer these phantoms of the strengthless dead, 
released from the flesh and bones by the funeral 
fire, ‘hover like a dream and flit away’ to the 
darkness by the stream of Ocean that bounds 
the earth. Once there, they are cut off, irrevoc- 
ably, from the land of the living, and such exist- 
ence as they have in the meadow of asphodel 
cannot be called life. The soul that survives, 
indeed, is not the intelligence or the moving 
force; it is less real than ‘the man himself,’ whom 
it resembles, less real than the body whose vital 
energy has perished in the moment of death. 
There is a curious likeness, which should be 
traceable to some common cause, between the 
Homeric Hades and the Hebrew Sheol, the 
‘land of darkness,’ the ‘house appointed for all 
living,’ with no distinction between the righteous 
and the wicked.? Perhaps in both cases, cer- 
tainly in the Greek, there is reason to suppose 
that this conception of a collective Hades over- 


t [liad xxiii, 103. 
2Cf. A. S. Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of Immortality (1922), 
Lecture II. 


Greek Views of Immortality 23 


laid, though it never finally superseded, the 
more primitive notion that the dead man who 
has received due rites of burial retains some 
measure of barely sentient existence in the tomb 
itself, where the best wish of the survivors, 
expressed in countless epitaphs, is that he may 
sleep in peace and that the earth may rest lightly 
upon him: svt trbi terra levis. This representation 
is naturally associated with a cult, in which 
offerings of food and flowers are evidence of a 
belief that the dead not only stand in need of 
nourishment, but also retain some share in the 
life, some interest in the fortune, of their families. 
But as memory fades and affection cools, the 
horror which is the obverse of reverent awe 
tends to assert itself, and we meet with traces 
of the world-wide feeling that the dead are 
unhappy and therefore malevolent, sensitive to 
any neglect of their dues, and terrible in the 
persistent vengefulness of an ancient wrath.* 
The Furies, or Erinyes, who became the avenging 
guardians of the natural or moral order of the 
world, derive their lineage from the outraged 
and angry ghost. Yet these too, with no violence 
to traditional feeling, can be invested by A’schy- 
lus with a beneficent aspect as the Reverend 
Goddesses, who still the winds, receive the 
sacrifice for accomplishment of marriage and for 
« Cf. F. Cumont, After Life in Roman Paganism (1922), p. 63. 


24 Immortality 


children, and send up from the underworld the 
fruits of the earth.* 

The cult of ancestors as the guardians of 
morality and the givers of wealth—two attri- 
butes of the spirits of Hesiod’s Golden Race— 
generally implies a settled community, tiling 
the ground and renewing its own life in the 
vicinity of the ancestral tombs. In early Greece 
such cults must have been maintained con- 
tinuously by the indigenous peoples. In the 
Heroic age, on the other hand, the houses of 
the individual dead are merged in a collective 
Hades, which has even been transferred from its 
proper place underground to the furthest dark- 
ness of the west. The duty of man towards the 
dead is ended with the offices of the funeral pyre. 
Until the flesh and bones are burned, the spirit 
uneasily haunts the neighbourhood of the body; 
and the purpose of the last rites is partly to 
relieve the survivors of its presence. It is natural 
to connect the abandonment of the ancestor cult 
with the conditions of the invading race for whom 
Homer sang—men who had broken with the 
ancient sanctities of a settled home. The migra- 
tions of the Hebrew people may have something 
to do with the similar representation of Sheol. 

Since the nature and quality of existence after 


Cf. J. E. Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 
ch. v. 


Greek Views of Immortality 25 


death are entirely a matter of faith, it is hard to 
understand why any system of belief should 
deny to humanity the prospect, beyond the 
grave, alike of happiness and of the sanction of 
moral sentiment. Here, it might seem, if any- 
where, our thwarted desires, from the highest to 
the lowest, might well create the promise of 
realisation. This has, indeed, happened in most 
of the great religions which have kept an endur- 
ing hold upon the human heart; it happened in 
the mystery religions of Greece itself. The 
difficulty is to see why it should not be universal. 
The Indian looks forward to his happy hunting 
grounds, the Mohammedan to his paradise. 
Why should Job look for nothing but ‘the land 
of darkness and of the shadow of death, without 
any order, and where the light is as the dark- 
ness’? Why should the ghost of Achilles say: 
‘Seek not to console me for death,” glorious 
Odysseus. I would rather be on earth as the 
hired servant of another, in the house of a land- 
less man with little to live upon, than be king 
over all the dead’? Only once does Homer speak 
of an Elysian Plain at the ends of the earth, 
where ‘life is easiest for men: there is no rain 
nor show nor winter storm, but always Ocean 
sends the breath of the high west wind, blowing 
cool upon men.’ But this counterpart of the 
* Odyssey iv, 565. 


26 Immortality 


divine Olympus is promised only to Menelaus, 
because he has Helen to wife and is the son-in- 
law of Zeus. In Hesiod the Islands of the Blest 
are reserved to the demigods who fought at 
Thebes and Troy.' | 

No solution, but a further element in the same 
problem, is presented by the belief, also com- 
mon to Jew and Greek, in the impassable barrier 
fixed between gods and men by the jealousy of 
heaven. In Yahwe and in Zeus, the Father of 
gods and men, we can discern the projected 
image of paternal authority and power, recoiling 
upon man in this jealous assertion of the super- 
ior’s privilege. Such is the nemesis of anthro- 
morphism: the more fully human a divinity 
becomes, the more he acquires the atomic im- 
penetrability of an individual person. His re- 
lations with man must then be rigidly external 
—what Socrates calls ‘a kind of traffic between 
gods and men,’ an art of giving to the gods in 
sacrifice and asking a return in prayer.’ 

Even this intercourse is undermined by philo- 
sophic reflection, where necessity allows no place 
for divine intervention; and the last stage is 
reached when the Epicurean banishes the gods 
to a careless beatitude in the mtermundane 
space. The atomism inherited by Epicurus 
from the last original men of science carried to 

t Works and Days, 166. 2 Plato, Euthyphro, 148. 


Greek Views of Immortality 27 


its furthest poimt the materialistic tendency of 
the Ionian school. The ‘immortal and imperish- 
able’ nature of things had been reduced by 
Anaximenes and his successors to the air, ‘from 
which men and all other animals derive the soul 
and intelligence they possess.’ Atomism re- 
duced the air itself and the other perceptible 
elements to particles of impenetrable stuff. The 
atoms which constitute the soul differ from the 
rest only in respect of their spherical shape and 
mobility. ‘It follows then that the whole nature 
of the soul is dissolved, like smoke, into the 
higher air; since we see it is begotten along with 
the body and grows up along with it and, as I 
have shewn, breaks down at the same time worn 
out with age.’? Despair of the future is offered 
as the only remedy for present fear. ‘Our life 
shall pass away as the trace of a cloud, and 
shall be dispersed as a mist, that is, driven away 
with the beams of the sun. Come on, therefore, 
let us enjoy the good things that are present. 
Let us fill ourselves with costly wine and oint- 
ments, and let no flower of the spring pass by 
us.’3 

The question of immortality, then, as distinct 
from a shadowy survival hardly to be preferred 


t Simplicius, Physics 152, Diogenes of Apollonia. 
2 Lucretius iii, 455, trans. Munro. 
3 Wisdom, ii. 


28 Immortality 


to extinction, turned always upon the question 
whether man, or any individual men, either 
were, or might become, divine. The mystery 
religions ventured upon the positive answer 
refused by the Olympian system and by the 
science of Ionia. It is true that the idea of the 
divine man or the incarnate god was not entirely 
confined to the mysteries. The exceptional 
promise of Elysium to Menelaus recalls the 
immemorial belief in the divinity of kings and 
heroes, prophets and priests, men who possess 
by inheritance or Inspiration a super-normal 
power, communicating through magical influence 
with the workings of the unseen. But this belief 
was aristocratic: it offered no consolation to the 
peasant or the slave, who found life hardest to 
endure. Here the mystery cults answered to a 
profound and perpetual need. A common fea- 
ture of all such cults is that they are independent . 
of civic structure: admission is gained, not by 
right of birth into a certain social group, but by 
a ceremony of purification. The Eleusinian 
mysteries of Demeter and Persephone were, at 
an early date, made accessible to strangers and 
to slaves. All that was demanded of the initiate 
was that he should be purified at the Little 
Mysteries in the spring, and so fitted to receive 
the revelation communicated at the chief festival 
in the autumn sowing season. There, in the 


Greek Views of Immortality 29 


passion play representing the ravishing and the 
return of the Corn-maiden, he read some assur- 
ance, however vague, of a renewal of life, and 
received the definite promise of a ‘better lot’ 
in the underworld, by grace of the goddesses 
whose rites he had seen. 

It is very significant that in the mystery cults 
the figure which dominates the typical group of 
divinities is not the Father, but the Mother— 
Demeter, Semele, Isis, Cybele—with her child 
or youthful consort—Persephone, Dionysus, 
Osiris, Attis. The worshipper is not confronted 
by the jealous authority that thunders in the 
height of heaven; he is welcomed by the Earth, 
the nursing-mother of children,? whose kindly 
fruits are man’s wealth (Plutus). The name of 
the Earth-mother is associated with ideas of 
birth and of rebirth; the analogy of the seed 
sown in hope of the annual resurrection suggests 
that to sink into the grave may be only to enter 
again into the womb: ‘that which thou sowest 
is not quickened, except it die.’ The scheme of 
all initiation ceremonies, ranging from the 
tribal initiations of the savage to the sacraments 
of civilised religion, 1s built upon the conception 


t Hymn to Demeter, 480; Sophocles, frag. 837, Pearson. 

2 Gé Kourotrophos. 

31 Cor. xv. Initiates of Eleusis must have been among the 
Corinthians for whom St. Paul wrote. 


30 Immortality 


of a death to the past which is at the same time 
a rebirth into a fuller life. The prevailing emo- 
tion—the ‘good hope,’ as the Pythagoreans 
called it—is easily extended to the prospect that 
lies beyond the natural fact of death. 

We cannot tell to what extent the doctrine of 
Eleusis underwent development during the thou- 
sand years which lie between the Hymn to 
Demeter and the destruction of the sanctuary 
by Alaric the Goth. We can only be certain that 
the beliefs and aspirations of individual initiates 
must have varied very widely with differences 
of temperament and philosophic culture. Prob- 
ably the formulas remained vague enough to 
accommodate them all. Meanwhile, from the 
sixth century B.c. or earlier, a movement from 
another quarter is traceable, which crystallised 
in a scheme of salvation with definite outlines 
of moral and theological doctrine. The sectaries 
of this unofficial religion, which came to central 
Greece from Southern Italy and Sicily, took for 
their patron saint the legendary Orpheus, who 
was said to have ‘invented’ or ‘composed’ the 
mystic rites of Dionysus Zagreus, and to have 
been torn in pieces by the Mzenads as the infant 
god had been torn in pieces by the Titans. The 
myth told how the Titans had eaten of the dis- 
membered body and then had been blasted by 
the thunderbolt of Zeus. From their ashes 


Greek Views of Immortality 31 


sprang mankind. Man has thus a dual nature; 
for though the Titans were evil, they had par- 
taken of the divine flesh, and we, their descend- 
ants, accordingly possess a soul of heavenly 
origin enclosed in a body of dark and evil nature. 
The myth reflects the consciousness of the 
divided self; its framers must have known the 
sense of sin as surely as they found the promise | 
of regeneration in the resurrection or rebirth of 
their divinity. 

The fundamental principle distinguishing the 
Dionysiac religion from the Olympian is the 
denial of any impassable barrier between gods 
and men. The philosophic tradition known as 
the ‘Italian’ philosophy because it drew its 
inspiration from this quarter—a tradition ex- 
tending from Pythagoras through Plato to 
Plotinus—declared that ‘jealousy has no station 
in the quire of heaven.’ * It recognised ‘a bond 
of association uniting us not only to one another 
and to the gods, but also to the irrational ani- 
mals; for there is a single spirit pervading the 
whole order of the world like a vita! principle.’ ? 
This continuity of all life implies that every soul, 
from the star to the reptile and the plant, is 
inherently divine and therefore immortal, so 
that it can mount in the scale of being from the 


1 Plato, Phedrus 247A. 
2 Sextus, adv. math. ix, 126. 


32 Immortality 


lowest degree to the felicity of the blest. Apo- 
theosis is no longer the proud privilege of kings; 
the democratic doctrine of transmigration ex- 
tends to any pure and virtuous soul the promise 
that it may ‘appear at last among men upon the 
earth as a seer, a poet, a physician, or a prince, 
and thence spring up as a god exalted in honour, 
sharing the hearth of the other Immortals and 
the same table, free from man’s woes, from 
destiny, and from all harm.’ ' 

If we trace this conception of identification 
with God back to its origin in the Thraco- 
Phrygian cult of Dionysus, we find it rooted in 
the experience of ecstasy or ‘enthusiasm’— 
names which describe the divine madness alter- 
natively as the liberation of the soul rapt from 
the body ‘out of oneself,’ or as the entrance of 
a universal spirit submerging the bounds of 
individuality with a flooding sense of commun- 
ion. This experience, induced by the drinking 
of wine and by dancing to the wild music of 
flute and drum, is the core of spiritual value in 
the orgiastic worship of the Meenads. The 
doctrine of transmigration, added by the Orphics 
and adopted by Pythagoras, develops the impli- 
cation that the soul is neither the perishable sum 
of the body’s vital functions, nor yet a shadowy 
and unreal double of the physical self, but an 

t Empedocles, frag. 146, 147. 


Greek Views of Immortality 33 


independent substance entering the body as a 
stranger from without, ‘an exile from Heaven. 
and a wanderer,’ which can be ‘born from time 
to time in all manner of mortal shapes, passing 
from one to another of the painful paths of life,’ 
till it finally shakes off the ‘alien garment of 
flesh’ and returns to its heavenly source.t The 
soul is of higher value, and therefore more real, 
than the body, with which ‘for certain purposes 
of punishment the soul is yoked together and 
buried in it, as in a tomb.’?. The means of 
escape is purification, understood at first in the 
ceremonial sense of abstinence from certaine—~ 
kinds of food and dress and the avoidance of 
contact with impurities, but moralised later in 
the doctrine that ‘the way of escape lies in 
becoming as like God as possible, and that 
means becoming righteous and holy with the 
help of wisdom.’ Thus the history of the soul 
is framed to the scheme of initiation: earthly 
life becomes the lesser mysteries of death, the 
purification which precedes the revelation of the 
Plain of Truth in another world. 

It must not be imagined that the Orphics or 
even the Pythagorean predecessors of Plato, 
drew out to the full the consequences of their 
theology. Possibly the bulk of the Orphie sec- 


t Empedocles, frag. 115, 126. 
2 Philolaus, frag. 14. 3 Plato, Theetetus 176. 


34 Immortality 


taries remained mere formalists, content to have 
performed the rites of the divinities of absolu- 
tion, and secure of admission to the Banquet of 
the Saints in Elysium, provided that they wore 
white garments, shunned contact with birth and 
burial, and eschewed the eating of things that 
have a living soul.t ‘There are many that bear 
the narthex, but few that are one with Bacchus.’ 
They transferred the Homeric Elysium to the 
underworld, and balanced it by a subterranean 
purgatory, where ‘they plunge the sinners and 
unrighteous men in a sort of mudpool, and set 
them to carry water in a sieve.’?, Upon a lower 
level we hear of the theurgy of ‘strolling sooth- 
sayers, who come to the rich man’s doors with a 
story of a power they possess by the gift of 
heaven to atone for any offence that he or his 
ancestors have committed, by means of sacrifice 
and incantations agreeably accompanied by 
feasting.’ But analogous perversions in more 
recent times may warn us not to judge the worth 
of the whole image from the feet of clay, however 
the base material may threaten its stability. We 
may indeed refrain from any judgment of value 
and leave undecided the question whether it is 
good or bad for man to believe in his own apo- 
theosis. It is enough to note the claim recorded 


t Cf. Euripides, frag. 472. Confession of the Cretan Initiates. 
2 Adeimantus in Plato, Republic ii. 3 Plato, zbid. 


Greek Views of Immortality 35 


in the amulets found in Orphic graves. They 
contain extracts from some lost document 
resembling the Egyptian Book of the Dead. The 
departed spirit declares that, though a child of 
earth as well as of the starry heaven, his race is 
of heaven alone; and he receives the assurance: 
‘From man thou hast become god.’ At any time 
after the influx of Eastern doctrines into Hellen- 
ism that followed the conquests of Alexander, 
the reference to the ‘starry heaven’ might be 
linked with the Babylonian conception of astral 
immortality, which occasioned a transference 
of the abode of the blest from the underworld 
to the heavenly fires. The soul came to be 
regarded as a particle of the divine ether which 
had fallen, through the primal sin, into the 
sublunary region of change and death. A 
Pythagorean catechism, of which some frag- 
ments survive, states that the Islands of the 
Blest are the sun and moon.! 

In Plato and Aristotle the dwelling-place of 
the unchangeable and divine is removed yet 
further from the earth to the region that is 
beyond the outermost heaven or sphere of the 
fixed stars. We here encounter the notion of 
eternity first beginning to be conceived, with 
any degree of clearness, in opposition to the idea 


t Diels, Vorsokratiker 14 358, 18. Cf. Cumont, After Life in 
Roman Paganism, Ch. III. 


36 Immortality 


of endless time. In Greek thought time was 
always associated with motion, and in particu- 
lar with; the revolution of the heavenly bodies. 
Aristotle even mentions some (probably Pytha- 
goreans) who actually identified time with the 
heavenly sphere itself.: Influenced by this asso- 
ciation and by the cyclical recurrence of the 
solar year—a representation of cardinal impor- 
tance in agricultural rites—the ancients tended 
to conceive time as a circle or a sphere, and in 
that sense as limited, though the revolving 
motion has neither beginning nor end. Hence it 
was possible to imagine an immutable condition 
outside the movement of time. Even in the 
scientific speculation of the early Ionians we 
find the picture of the evolving cosmos whirled 
round in the vortex (dinos), while beyond it 
extends the unchanging circumambient nature, 
which Anaximander described as immortal, im- 
perishable, divine. Parmenides (about 500-490 
B.c.) was the first to announce the unreality of 
time, as a necessary consequence of the un- 
reality of change and motion. His real Being 
is unborn and imperishable, ‘nor was it ever nor 
will it be, since it is now all at once, one and 
continuous.’ In this strange form of pantheism 
the one unmoved Being is not outside the world, 


t Physics A, 10. 218 a 81. 2 Aristotle, Physics iii, 4. 
3 Parmenides, frag. 8. 


Greek Views of Immortality 37 


but itself forms the finite sphere, as the sole 
reality behind the illusory screen of sensible 
appearance. But in the mythical proem describ- 
ing Parmenides’ journey to the spiritual world, 
the chariot and horses, guided by the Sun 
maidens, carry him to ‘the gates of the paths of 
Day and Night,’ as if this world were situated 
in the ‘region above the heaven’ visited by the 
soul-chariots of Plato’s kindred allegory. The 
Orphics, again, have their wheel of birth or 
becoming, which is the wheel of time serving as 
the framework of transmigration. In the grave- 
tablets the soul of the dead man says: ‘I have 
flown out of the sorrowful weary wheel.’ Here 
it is Once more indicated that the abode of the 
divine is beyond the cycle of temporal change. 
Empedocles, combining Orphic-Pythagorean re- 
ligion with Ionian science, builds the wheel of 
becoming into his physical system, setting 
heaven and hell, the alternating reigns of Love 
and Hate, at the poles of the circle. He also 
believed in the escape from the cycle of re- 
incarnation, and proclaimed that he was already 
‘an immortal god, mortal no more.’? 

We have already observed that the idea of 
identification with God has its psychological 
root in the experience of ecstasy or enthusiasm, 
characteristic of Dionysiac religion. The same 

t Plato, Phedrus, 247. 2 Frag. 112. 


38 Immortality 


may be said of the concept of Eternity; that is 
to say, 1t may be doubted whether this concept 
would ever have been formed, if states which 
appear to be timeless had not been actually 
experienced and taken as a warrant of the 
intrinsic divinity of the soul. Baron Friedrich 
von Hiigel, after quoting Rohde’s imaginative 
description of the Meenads’ dances, continues: 
‘I would only insist, even more than Rohde, 
upon the fact that all states of trance, or indeed 
of rapt attention, notoriously appear to the 
experiencing soul in proportion to their concen- 
tration, as timeless; i.e. as non-successive, simul- 
taneous, hence as eternal. They appear thus 
to the soul, if not during, at least soon after, 
the experience. And hence the eternity of the 
soul is not, here, a conclusion drawn from the ap- 
parent God-likeness, in other respects, of the 
soul when in this condition, but the eternity on 
the contrary, 1s the very centre of the experience 
itself, and is the chief inducement to the soul for 
holding itself to be divine. The soul’s immortal- 
ity cannot be experienced in advance of death, 
whilst its eternity, in the sense indicated, is, or 
seems to be, directly experienced in such “‘this- 
life’? states; hence the belief in immortality is 
here derivative, that in eternity is primary.’ ? 


t F. von Hiigel, Eternal Life. Edinburgh, 1912, p. 27. Dostoyev- 
sky has given an authoritative description of the timeless experience: 


Greek Views of Immortality 39 


In Greece the timeless experience gave rise to 
the belief in a distinct form of soul, native to the 
eternal world. Pindar, in one of his dirges, says 


“He always had one minute just before the epileptic fit (if it came on 
while he was awake), when suddenly in the midst of sadness, spiritual 
darkness and oppression, there seemed at moments a flash of light in 
his brain, and with extraordinary impetus all his vital forces suddenly 
began working at their highest tension. The sense of life, the con- 
sciousness of self, were multiplied ten times at these moments which 
passed like a flash of lightning. His mind and his heart were flooded 
with extraordinary light; all his uneasiness, all his doubts, all his 
anxieties were relieved at once; they were all merged in a lofty calm, 
full of serene, harmonious joy and hope. But these moments, these 
flashes, were only the prelude of that final second (it was never more 
than a second) with which the fit began. That second was, of course, 
unendurable. Thinking of that moment later, when he was all right 
again, he often said to himself that all these gleams and flashes of the 
highest sensation of life and self-consciousness, and therefore also of 
the highest form of existence, were nothing but disease, the inter- 
ruption of the normal condition; and if so it was not at all the 
highest form of being but on the contrary must be reckoned the 
lowest. And yet he came at last to an extremely paradoxical 
conclusion. “‘What if it is disease?”’ he decided at last. “‘ What 
does it matter that it is an abnormal intensity, if the minute of 
sensation, remembered and analysed afterwards in health, turns out 
to be the acme of harmony and beauty, and gives a feeling, unknown 
and undivined till then, of completeness, of proportion, of reconci- 
lation, and of ecstatic devotional merging in the highest synthesis of 
life?’”? These vague expressions seemed to him very comprehensible, 
though too weak. That it really was “‘beauty and worship,” that it 
really was the “‘highest synthesis of life’? he could not doubt... . 
It was not as though he saw abnormal and unreal visions of some sort 
at that moment, as from hashish, opium or wine, destroying the 
reason and distorting the soul. He was quite capable of judging 
of that when the attack was over. These moments were only an 
extraordinary quickening of self-consciousness—if the condition was 
to be expressed in one word—and at the same time of the direct 
sensation of existence in the most intense degree. Since at that 


40 Immortality 


that after the death of the body there survives 
what he calls ‘an image of the life’ (eon). He 
declares that ‘this alone is from heaven,’ and 
that, though ‘it sleeps while the limbs are ac- 
tive,’ during slumber it is active itself, revealing 
to the dreamer visions of judgment after death. 
In this passage, where Orphic influence is cer- 
tainly to be traced, a soul or spirit of divine 
origin and inherent immortality seems to be 
clearly contrasted with the vital functions of the 
mortal body, since its activity alternates with 
theirs. We may read here an early expression 
of the doctrine, established under the influence 
of the Platonic school, of the threefold division of 
man into a divine and immortal spirit (nous), 
a mortal soul (psyche), and a body. The spirit 
and the soul respectively belong by nature to 
the eternal world of unchanging reality and to 
the world of transient becoming in time. Im- 


second, that is at the very last conscious moment before the fit, he 
had time to say to himself clearly and consciously: “Yes, for this 
moment one might give one’s whole life!” then without doubt 
that moment was really worth the whole of life.... ‘‘At that 
moment,” as he told Rogozhin . ... ‘‘I seem somehow to under- 
stand the extraordinary saying that there shall be no more time,”’’ 
The Idict, ch. v, trans. C. Garnett. 

t Fragment 131. James Adam, who illustrates this fragment 
in Cambridge Prelections, 1906, rightly rejects “‘eternity” as a 
rendering of aidéy here; but I doubt if he is right in taking the words 
to mean merely the Homeric ‘shadow of the living self.” On the 
meaning of aldy cf. A. C. Pearson, Verbal Scholarship and the Growth 
of some Abstract Terms, Cambridge, 1922, p. 26. 


Greek Views of Immortality 41 


mortality, in this view, no longer means the 
continuance, in the two portions of time that lie 
before birth and after death, of a life and con- 
sciousness resembling those which fill the inter- 
val of mortal existence. It means that the 
immortal spirit, like Parmenides’ Being, ‘never 
was nor will be, since it 1s now all at once’; its 
date is the ‘stationary now’ of eternity, not here 
or there in the ‘flowmg now’ of time.t The 
mortal soul, on the other hand, the sum of the 
vital functions entailed by incarnation in a 
material body, endures only for the span; of 
temporal life. Man as a whole exists in both 
worlds. As St. Thomas says of the spiritual 
creature, in respect of those affections and acts 
of intelligence in which there is succession, he 
is measured by time; in respect of his vision of 
glory (or, as Plato would say, of the immutable 
Ideas), he partakes of eternity. To this St. 
Thomas adds a third mode of measurement, 
@vum (the Latin equivalent of eon), which is 
‘between eternity and time, partaking of both,’ 
and ‘has not in itself a before and after, but can 
be conjoined with them.’ By this is measured 
the spiritual creature in respect of its native 
being. The Platonic nous might claim this 
mode of duration, which the Christian doctor 


t Boetius, de cons v. nunc fluens facit tempus, nunc stans facit 
eternitatem. 


42 Immortality 


attributes to the heavenly bodies and the 
angels. 

St. Thomas no doubt had in mind that passage 
where Aristotle speaks of eternity as belonging to 
the things of the region ‘outside the heavens, ’ 
where is neither place, nor void, nor time. 
‘They cannot change nor be affected in any way, 
but they live the best and most self-sufficing life 
throughout all their duration (@on).’ ton, he 
says, is derived from avez on, ‘being for ever’; 
it denotes the immortal and divine, ‘from which 
are derived, with divers degrees of clear expres- 
sion or of dimness, the being and life of all other 
things.’ The only activity possible to the 
divine being is the activity of the thinking mind, 
which ‘becomes its object in the act of compre- 
hending it,’ so that object and subject are iden- 
tical. ‘That God should be always in that good 
state in which we sometimes are, is a wonderful 
thing; still more wonderful, if his state be better 
than ours. And it is better. And life belongs 
to God; for the activity of thought is life, and 


t Summa, Qu. x, Art. v. AZ’ vum ipsum est medium inter eterni- 
tatem et tempus, utroque participans. ... Tempus habet prius 
et posterius; e2vum autem non habet in se prius et posterius, sed ei 
conjungi possunt; eternitas autem non habet prius neque posterius, 
neque ea compatitur. Creature spirituales quantum ad affectiones 
et intelligentias, in quibus est successio mensurantur tempore... 
quantum vero ad eorum esse naturale, mensurantur evo; sed quan- 
tum ad visionem gloriz, participant eternitatem. 

2 De Celo I, ix. 


Greek Views of Immortality 43 


God is that activity; his essential activity 1s an 
eternal life that is the best possible life. We 
say, then, that God is a living being, eternal and 
most good, so that life and duration continuous 
and eternal belong to God; for this is God.’ ' 
The creative period of Greek thought ends 
with the injunction to achieve immortality and 
divinity in the exercise of speculative reason. 
‘Such a life as this is higher than the measure of 
humanity; not in virtue of his humanity will 
man lead this life, but in virtue of something in 
him that is divine; and by as much as this some- 
thing is superior to his composite nature, by so 
much is its activity superior to the rest of virtue. 
If the Reason (nous) is divine in comparison with 
man, so is the life of Reason divine in comparison 
with human life. We ought not to listen to those 
who exhort man to keep to man’s thoughts, or a 
mortal to the thoughts of mortality, but, so far 
as may be, to achieve immortality and do what 
man may to live according to the highest thing 
that is in him; for little though it be in bulk, in 
power and worth it is far above all the rest.’ 
The mystic gospel of identification with God 
has here reached a perilous summit. ‘Not in 
virtue of his humanity will man lead this life’— 
the words ring with a double sound. A doubt 


t Metaphysics xii, 7. 
2 Aristotle, Ethics x. 7. 


44 Immortality 


arises whether the achievement of divinity in 
the timeless contemplation of truth is not an 
ideal that overreaches the aspirations of com- 
mon humanity. Is this philosophic apotheosis 
even consistent with the ends that make immor- 
tality an object of desire? The author of the 
Timeus tells us that only ‘some small portion 
of mankind’ shares with the gods in the pos- 
session of Reason (nous).t Aristotle left the 
question of individual or personal survival in 
obscurity, and, in his less popular writings, gave 
little encouragement to ordinary hopes. Cen- 
turies later, Platonism, revived in its most 
religious form—the system of Plotinus—fell 
back upon faith and rescued the individuality 
of human spirits from absorption in a universal 
Mind. ‘A pleasant life is theirs in heaven; they 
have the truth for mother, nurse, real being, and 
nutriment; they see all things, not the things 
that are born and die, but those which have 
real being; and they see themselves in others. 
For them all things are transparent, and there is 
nothing dark or impenetrable, but everyone is 
manifest to everyone internally, and all things 
are manifest; for light is manifest to light. For 
everyone has all things in himself and sees all 
things in another; so that all things are every- 
where and all is all and each is all, and the glory 


t Plato, Timeus 518. 


Greek Views of Immortality 45 


is infinite.’ * So Plotinus; but it must not be for- 
gotten that a neo-Platonist in the last centuries 
of paganism was as rare as a neo-Hegelian in the 
present day. Meanwhile the Stoics added 
nothing to the doctrine of immortality, except 
the confusion caused by disagreement among 
themselves. In the popular mind every form of 
belief noticed in this chapter subsisted in un- 
reconciled discord. The common man saw 
nothing but a twilight of uncertainty, in which 
the perpetual Light of the apocalypt—requiem 
eternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat 
eis—struggled vainly with the perpetual Night 
of the Roman lover— 


Soles occidere et redire possunt; 
Nobis, cum semel occidit brevis lux, 
Nox est perpetua una dormienda. 


tPlotinus, Ennead v, 8, 4, translated by Dr. Inge, whose Philo- 
sophy of Plotinus (1918) vol. ii, should be consulted on this subject. 


Immortality in Indian Thought 


A. A. MACDONELL, Ph.D. 
Boden Professor of Sanskrit, Oxford University. 


Iv is particularly interesting and important to 
ascertain what beliefs have been held regarding 
immortality in India. For here we have a 
civilisation the literary evidence for which goes 
back to an earlier period than that of any other 
Aryan-speaking people. The spiritual life here 
recorded has been continuous for more than 
3,000 years, ever since the conquering Aryan 
tribes made their way into the territory of the 
North-West some 1,500 years B.c. and subse- 
quently imposed their culture on the whole 
sub-continent. The mental development of the 
Indo-Aryans has, moreover, remained isolated, 
being altogether separated from that of the rest 
of the world, for at least the first 2,000 years. 
Even the Muhammadan invasion, the earliest 
of a permanent character, which began about 
700 a.D. and ended with the almost complete 
46 


Immortality in Indian Thought 47 


conquest of India three centuries later, exercised 
practically no influence on the course of Hindu 
beliefs. 

The evidence furnished by a comparison of 
the Avesta, the sacred book of the Ancient 
Persians, shows that when these closely cognate 
peoples still formed one single nation, they 
already composed metrical hymns. The Indians, 
when they branched off from the Persians and 
migrated into India, continued to produce such 
poetry. More than 1,000 hymns are preserved 
as a collection called the Rigveda. That it was 
composed in the Punjab, the territory of the Five 
Rivers, is proved by the geographical data which 
the hymns contain and the flora and fauna 
which they mention. The religion which the 
Rigveda embodies is a polytheistic one. The 
hymns for the most part consist of invocations 
of many gods who represent personified powers 
of nature and appear in various stages of an- 
thropomorphism. As the hymns are chiefly 
_expressions of prayer and praise, they contain 
ample material showing what those ancient 
Indian poets held to be the spiritual nature of 
the gods. The funeral hymns, together with 
stray allusions elsewhere in the Rigveda, furnish 
evidence as to what the poets believed regarding 
the human soul. It is our task here to extract 
from Indian literature the ideas about immor- 


48 Immortality 


tality, both of gods and men, held since the 
earliest phase of Indian religion. 

The true gods of the Rigveda, which may ‘be 
called the Old Testament of the Indians, are 
represented there as glorified human beings, in- 
spired with human motives and passions. 

It was a settled view that the gods had a 
beginning. They are constantly stated to have 
been the children of Heaven and Earth. In a 
cosmogonic hymn they are said to have come 
into being from the one primordial substance, 
but in the philosophical hymns their origin is 
mostly connected with the element of water. 
Again, certain individual gods or groups of gods 
are spoken of as having been begotten by others. 
Earlier gods, too, are expressly referred to in 
several passages. In the Atharvaveda, a collec- 
tion of hymns later than the Rigveda, some gods 
are spoken of as fathers, others as sons; ten gods 
are, moreover, referred to as having existed 
before the rest; but here they are also said to 
have arisen from the non-existent. In the 
ritualist, later Vedic works called Brihmanas, 
Prajapati, Lord of Creatures, who by this time 
had come to be regarded as the chief of the gods, 
is stated to have created the gods. So, too, in 
cosmogonic or philosophical hymns and in the 
ritual treatises the gods are described as having 
been created, but elsewhere as having been born 


Immortality in Indian Thought 49 


like men. Although they are always supposed 
to have had a beginning, they are at the same 
time regarded as immortal. Of what nature 
was this immortality thought to be? The gods 
were not regarded as immortal from the time 
they came into existence. The Atharvaveda in 
fact expressly states that they were originally 
mortal. The Brahmanas also observe this of 
the gods as a body and of the individual deities 
Indra, the Thunderer, Agni, Fire, and Prajapati, 
the Creator. This is also the implication in the 
Rigveda. For here the gods are declared to have 
had immortality bestowed on them by the 
deities Savitar and Agni; they are also said to 
have attained it by drinking Soma, the draught 
of immortality (amrita etymologically akin to 
the Greek ambrosia). Indra is further stated to 
have become immortal by the practice of aus- 
terity; and in later Vedic texts the gods as a 
whole are pronounced to have attained divine 
rank by the same means. 

It is characteristic of the gods that they are 
unaging and ever young. Their life is described 
as being spent in heaven or the third and highest 
heaven, where they lead a joyous existence, 
exhilarated by the draught of immortality. 
The use of the word amrita, “undying,” “im- 
mortal,” indicates that the gods were regarded 
in the earliest phase of Indian civilisation as 


50 Immortality 


essentially immortal, though they may not 
have been so in remote ages. Primarily an ad- 
jective, often qualifying the word deva, “god,” 
it comes to be frequently used as a substantive 
meaning “an immortal,” ‘“‘a god.” In the 
neuter the word signifies “the immortal,” that 
is, the totality of the gods, then also the “drink 
of the immortals,” and “immortality.” 

There is no evidence to show whether the 
Vedic poets regarded the immortality of the 
gods as absolute. It is, however, probable that 
they considered it to be vaguely unending, 
though it had a beginning. According to the 
post-Vedic view it was limited to a cosmic age, 
at the end of which the world is destroyed and 
relapses into chaos. 

We can now proceed to enquire what was the 
view of the earliest Veda regarding the human 
soul and its fate after death. The evidence for 
this is to be found chiefty in the five funeral 
hymns of the Rigveda. It is clear that the 
beliefs held concerning the future life were largely 
influenced by the funeral customs prevailing at 
the time. Death apparently seldom engaged 
the thoughts of the Vedic poets except at fu- 
nerals. Though burial was practised to some 
extent in the earliest Vedic period, cremation 
was the usual way for the dead to reach the 
next world. The later Vedic ritual practically 


Immortality in Indian Thought | 51 


knew this method only. For besides the bones 
and ashes of adults, only young children and 
ascetics were interred. Agni, the god of fire, 
is described as taking the corpse to the fathers 
and the gods in the other world and conducting 
the mortal to the highest immortality. He 
leads men to the loftiest place of the sun, to the 
highest heaven, to the world of the righteous, 
whither the ancient, earliest seers have passed 
away. A goat and a horse are sacrificed to pre- 
cede the corpse on its way to the highest abode. 
The sacrificial goat which announces the de- 
ceased to the fathers traverses a gulf of thick 
darkness before reaching the third vault of 
heaven, which is also described as the inmost 
recess of the sky, the home of eternal light, or as 
the highest region of the sun. Pious men are 
said to enjoy bliss in that dear dwelling, the 
highest step of Vishnu, who is one of the forms 
of the sun-god. Heaven is regarded as the 
reward of those who practise rigorous penance, 
of heroes who risk their lives in battle, and 
above all of those who bestow liberal sacrificial 
gifts. 

The life in heaven is passed among the gods, 
particularly in the presence of Yama, the chief 
of the dead, and of Varuna, the highest ethical 
figure in the Vedic pantheon. Here the deceased 
is united with a glorified body, and sees again 


52 Immortality 


father, mother and sons, wife and children. 
Complete in body and limbs, he is free from all 
ailments. In this world of eternal light and swift 
waters the life is one of satiety, the fulfilment 
of all desires, and beatitude. Here are ponds 
filled with ghee (clarified butter), and streams 
flowing with milk, honey and wine. The sound 
of the lute and of songs is enjoyed in the shade 
of a wide-spreading tree. 

Thus the life of the righteous dead in heaven 
was clearly regarded as one of indolent material 
bliss, in which, exempt from all frailties, the 
deceased were associated with the gods, and 
devoted themselves to sensuous joys. It was a 
corporeal life, like that left behind on earth, but 
a glorified one subject to no defects. 

On the other hand, the ideas about hell are so 
faint in the earliest Veda, that in the opinion of 
the great Vedic scholar Roth, the religion of 
that period knows nothing of an abode of the 
wicked, who were supposed to be annihilated by 
death. Yet there seem to be traces of a belief in 
some kind of hell. Thus there is a passage in 
which the gods Indra and Soma are besought to 
dash evil-doers into the abyss, into bottomless 
darkness, so that not one of them may escape. 
The evidence, however, cannot be said to go 
beyond the conception of a dark underground 
abode for the wicked. Such an idea was prob- 


Immortality in Indian Thought 53 


ably connected with the old custom of burial. 
But in the Atharvaveda and in an Upanishad 
(as the theosophical appendages to the ritual 
Brahmanas were called), the belief in a regular 
hell is beyond doubt. The former speaks of the 
house below, the abode of female goblins and 
sorceresses, as contrasted with the heavenly 
world, the realm of Yama. To this underground 
region the murderer is consigned. It is several 
times described as lowest or black darkness, and 
once at least as a place of torment. But it is not 
till the period of the ritual treatises called 
Brahmanas, which are subsequent to the Vedas, 
that the notion of future punishment appears 
plainly developed. The doctrine here is that 
after death, all, both good and bad, are born 
again in the next world, and are recompensed 
according to their deeds, though nothing is said 
as to the eternity of reward or punishment. One 
Brahmana further states that every one is born 
again after death and is weighed in a balance, 
being rewarded and punished according as his 
works are good or bad. 

The Vedic description of the life in heaven 
implies that it is regarded as one of indefinite 
duration. This is corroborated by the state- 
ments made about the early fathers, who made 
the ancient paths by which the recent dead go 
to join them, who lead the same life as the gods, 


54 Immortality 


and who are paid almost divine honours. Like 
the gods, they receive oblations as their food, 
which, however, is distinguished from the por- 
tion of the gods. They are worshipped and are 
entreated to hear, intercede for, and protect 
their votaries. The Atharvaveda actually calls 
the fathers immortal and even speaks of them as 
gods. Cosmical actions like those of the gods 
are also sometimes attributed to the fathers. 
Thus they are said to have adorned the sky with 
stars and to have placed darkness in the night 
and light in the day. But the path of the fathers 
is distinguished from that of the gods, and in a 
Brahmana the heavenly world is contrasted 
with that of the fathers. 

The Vedic conception of the nature of the 
human soul that enters the condition of immor- 
tality in heaven, emerges best from the allusions 
contained in the funeral hymns of the Rigveda. 
We have seen that fire seemed to destroy the 
earthly body, though the real personality was 
thought to survive and to be imperishable. This 
is based on a primitive belief that there was a 
soul capable of separation from the body, even 
during unconsciousness, and of continued exist- 
ence even after its complete separation from the 
body after death. The usual term denoting 
this animating entity is in the Rzgveda called 
dtman, ‘“‘breath,” and asu, “spirit,” which 


Immortality in Indian Thought 55 


express physical vitality, and manas, “soul,” 
as the seat of thought and emotion, which at 
the time of the Rigveda seems to have been 
regarded as dwelling in the heart. Many pas- 
sages show that life and death were supposed 
to depend on the continuance in, or departure 
from, the body of the vital principle (asu or 
manas). The term “‘spirit-leading”’ (asunitz) is 
used to express the guidance by Agni of the 
soul on its way after death from this world to 
the next. Here the soul must have been regarded 
as retaining its personal identity. For it is 
invoked, after reaching heaven, by the designa- 
tion of the individual it represented on earth as 
‘father,’ “grandfather,” or some other ancestor. 
But these early poets were incapable of conceiv- 
ing the immortality upon which the soul now 
entered as a purely spiritual one. For it con- 
tinues to lead a corporeal existence in heaven, 
having re-united with its old body refined by 
the power of Agni. The conception of the latter 
may have been like that of the subtile body of 
the later Indian philosophy. From what has 
been said it appears that in the view of the 
Vedic poets divine immortality was a qualified 
one, having a beginning and possibly an end; 
while human immortality began only when the 
soul of the righteous after death reached heaven, 
where its existence was indefinitely prolonged 


56 Immortality 


like that of the gods. In both cases it was a 
state of material, not spiritual bliss. Research 
has shown that by the end of the Vedic period 
and before the rise of Buddhism about 500 B.c., 
a profound change had taken place both in the 
social organisation and in the religious views of 
the Indo-Aryans. Two features had by then 
been stamped on their civilisation which have 
ever since marked it off from that of the rest of 
the world. These were the caste system on the 
one hand and the doctrine of transmigration on 
the other. The roots of the former can be traced 
in the Vedas, those of the latter in the Brah- 
manas. ‘Together they have dominated Indian 
civilisation ever since, for some 2,500 years. 
The sixth century B.c. thus constitutes an epoch 
of the utmost importance in the history of Indian 
thought and institutions; for it forms the main 
dividing line between the two parts of that 
history regarded as a whole. It is only with the 
former aspect of Indian civilisation that we are 
here concerned. The amazing elaboration of 
ritual which the worship of the gods had reached 
in the Brahmanas and which Andrew Lang 
somewhere describes as the sacerdotage of 
religion, had turned the thoughts of the most 
intellectual spirits of the age away from a highly 
mechanical system and driven them to speculate 
on a more satisfying means of salvation. For 


Immortality in Indian Thought 57 


this purpose the theosophical treatises called 
Upanishads, which are attached to the Brah- 
manas, are chiefly concerned with discussing the 
nature of the divine soul, now the centre of 
interest as compared with the pantheon of the 
Vedas. The predominant conclusion resulting 
from these discussions is that there is one su- 
preme impersonal soul called Brahma which is 
immanent in the world as its body. The in- 
dividual human soul obtains salvation by ab- 
sorption in this world soul, and its consciousness 
then ceases. But the union of the individual 
soul with the supreme soul can only be accom- 
plished as the result of acquiring the knowledge 
that the two are identical. Nor can it be con- 
summated till the individual soul has undergone, 
in an almost endless series of lives, full retribu- 
tion for the various deeds (karma) performed in 
previous existences. This doctrine of re-incarna- 
tion, unknown to the Vedas, first begins to 
appear in a Brahmana where the statement 
occurs that those who do not perform religious 
rites with correct knowledge are born again 
after their decease and repeatedly become the 
food of death. This means in other words the 
rise of a consciousness that wrong deeds done in 
this life ought to be punished in future existences. 
We have seen that the Vedic poets when they 
turned their minds to the next life contemplated 


58 Immortality 


the joys of heaven almost exclusively, and hardly 
gave a thought to the fate of the wicked. The 
doctrine of karma or retribution grew up with 
that of transmigration and became a necessary 
element in it: for it satisfied the sense of justice 
which demanded retribution in another existence 
for deeds which evidently often lacked such 
requital in the present life; misfortune or pro- 
sperity being often clearly seen to be caused by 
no action done during this existence. The 
theory of karma was gradually elaborated so as 
to regulate the course of every future existence, 
which is good or bad according to a man’s deed, 
and in which every individual passes into a 
heaven or hell, or into the bodies of men or 
animals or mto plants on earth, where he is 
rewarded or punished for all deeds committed 
in a previous life. The course of karma came to 
be regarded like the operation of a natural law 
from which there is no escape. A passage in one 
of the epics expresses this in a more homely 
way: “The deed previously done follows after 
the doer as among a thousand cows a calf finds 
its mother.”” But though past action governs 
everything with inexorable necessity, the theory 
of karma contains the valuable ethical principle 
that every man is the architect of his own fate 
by regulating his future action. But release 
from future existences, or salvation, cannot be 


Immortality in Indian Thought 59 


produced by merit alone; it is brought about by 
saving knowledge, which breaks into life inde- 
pendently, destroys the subsequent effects of 
works which would otherwise bear fruit in future 
existences, and thus puts an end to transmigra- 
tion. It cannot, however, influence those works 
which have already begun to mature. The 
present life therefore continues from the moment 
of enlightenment till definite salvation is attained 


at death, just as the potter’s wheel goes on re- .«» 


volving for a time after the completion of the 
pot. But no merit or demerit results from acts 
done after enlightenment or “conversion”’ as it 
would be called in the West. In this condition 
the individual soul, at death, is absorbed in the 
world-soul and continues to exist in unconscious- 
ness for ever. 

There is perhaps nothing so striking in the 
history of civilisation as that a fantastic theory 
like that of transmigration combined with retri- 
bution, to demonstrate which no philosophical 
attempt was ever made, took such irresistible 
hold of the Indian mind as to have been con- 
sidered self-evident for 2,500 years by every 
philosophical school or religious sect in India, 
excepting only the Charvakas, or materialists. 
By the acceptance of this doctrine the Vedic 
optimism, which looked forward to a life of 
endless happiness in heaven, was transformed 


60 Immortality 


into a pessimistic dread of an interminable 
series of existences leading from one death to 
another. It seems not improbable that the 
Aryan settlers received the first impulse in the 
direction of the transmigration theory from 
the aboriginal inhabitants of India. Among half- 
savage tribes there is a wide-spread belief that 
the soul after death passes into the trunks of 
trees and the bodies of animals. Thus the 
Sonthals of India are said even at the present 
day to hold that the souls of the good enter into 
fruit-bearing trees. But among such races the 
notion of transmigration does not go beyond a 
belief in the continuance of human existence in 
animals and trees. If, therefore, the Indo- 
Aryans borrowed this idea from the aborigines, 
it was they who elaborated out of it the theory 
of an unbroken chain of existences inseparably 
linked with the moral principle of requital. 

The crude and material Vedic conception of 
immortality we find replaced in this epoch by a 
far more mature and abstract one, the result of 
an intensified power of philosophical thought. 
For the personal pantheon of the Vedas has been 
substituted the one purely impersonal world- 
soul, an eternal spirit without beginning or end. 
Instead of the individual soul of the Vedas, 
which has a beginning and after death passes to 
a continuous existence in a material heaven, we 


te 


Immortality in Indian Thought 61 


meet with an entity which after undergoing a 
moralized, beginningless and almost unending 
series of re-incarnations, finally, at the end of 
its last incarnation, becomes merged in the 
world-soul and remains, thus united, immortal, 
but in a state of unconsciousness. This view, 
embodying the main teaching of the Upanishads, 
was in later centuries developed into the system 
of philosophy called Vedanta, which was com- 
pleted (c. 800 a.p.) by the great commentator 
Sankara with the addition of the doctrine of 
Maya or cosmic illusion. According to this the 
whole phenomenal world is a product of Maya, 
which is caused by “ignorance,” so that the 
world-soul, the impersonal Brahma, is the sole 
existing reality. This is the philosophical sys- 
tem which has had by far the greatest number 
of Hindu adherents down to the present day. 
But it is far too abstract, especially in its con- 
ception of the world-soul, to be grasped except 
by the few intellectuals in a population 85 per 
cent. of which even now is agricultural and 
illiterate. Theistic sectarian modifications of 
this system took its place among the people. 
Before turning to these it is advisable to con- 
sider what orthodox or heterodox views in India 
arose in the early years of the new era regarding 
immortality. ‘The monistic theory of the early 
Upanishads aroused the antagonism of the 


62 Immortality 


adherents of the Sankhya system of philosophy, 
the beginnings of which are probably pre-Bud- 
dhistic. Its teaching is entirely dualistic, as it 
admits only two things, both without beginning 
and end, but essentially different: matter on the 
one hand, and an infinite plurality of individual 
souls on the other. The saving knowledge which 
is here assumed to deliver from the misery of 
transmigration, consists in recognising the abso- 
lute distinction between soul and matter. The 
world is maintained to be real, and that from 
all eternity; for the existent cannot be produced 
from the non-existent. The world is described 
as developing according to certain laws out of 
primitive matter. The method followed by this 
system is particularly mteresting because it 
rises from the known elements of experience to 
the unknown by logical demonstration till the 
ultimate cause is reached. But what concerns 
us here is the doctrine held by this school regard- 
ing the nature of soul. As to a supreme god who 
creates and rules the universe, his existence is 
totally denied as unnecessary and in fact irre- 
concilable with the system. For the unconscious 
matter of nature is declared to contain within 
itself from the beginning the power of evolution, 
the course of which is determined exclusively 
by karma. The atheism of the system was 
defended by its adherents with the declaration 


Immortality in Indian Thought 63 


that the origin of evil presents an insoluble 
problem to the theist, because a god who has 
created and rules the world could not possibly 
escape from the reproach of cruelty and injustice. 
On the other hand, individual souls exist, with- 
out beginning or end, in infinite number. There 
is no difference between these souls in them- 
selves, for they have no attributes or qualities, 
all their mental operations, when they are em- 
bodied, being carried on by the mechanical 
processes of the internal organs, that is, by 
matter. The principle of personality and iden- 
tity is supplied by the subtile or internal body, 
which, consisting mainly of the inner organs, 
surrounds and is made conscious by the soul. 
This internal body, being the vehicle of merit 
and demerit, which are the basis of transmigra- 
tion, accompanies the soul on its wanderings 
from one gross body to another, whether the 
latter be that of a god, a man, an animal or a 
tree. Conscious life is mvariably associated 
with pain, in which pleasure is included by this 
peculiarly pessimistic philosophy. When salva- 
tion, which is the absolute cessation of pain, is 
obtained, the internal body is dissolved into its 
material elements, and the soul, becoming finally 
isolated, continues to exist individually but im 
absolute unconsciousness. The Sankhya was 
acknowledged as an orthodox system of Hindu 


64 Immortality 


philosophy because it did not reject the su- 
premacy of the Brahmin caste and the authority 
of the Veda. But these two conditions were 
rejected by the two heterodox philosophical 
religions of Buddhism and Jainism, which arose 
contemporaneously in Northern Central India 
towards the end of the sixth century B.c. They 
resemble the Sankhya system in all their main_ 
outlines.“ The theory has therefore been ad- 
vanced that that system was their source. Their 
fundamental doctrine is that life is nothing but 
suffering. The aim of both is to redeem man- 
kind from the misery of mundane existence by 
the annihilation of desire, with the aid of renun- 
ciation of the world and the practice of un- 
bounded kindness towards all creatures. Both 
acknowledged the existence of the lower and 
ephemeral gods of Brahmanism, but what most 
concerns us here, is that both, like the Sankhya, 
denied the existence of an eternal supreme Deity. 
As to the individual soul, the Jaina view is quite 
similar to that of the Sankhya. After passing 
through mnumerable transmigrations it finally 
attains, by the correct kind of knowledge, to 
salvation (nirvdna), after which it dwells apart 
for ever, completely isolated from worldly 
existence. Buddhism on the other hand denied 
the existence of the individual soul also. It is 
a testimony to the irresistible hold the theory of 


Immortality in Indian Thought 65 


transmigration had taken of the Indian mind 
that Buddha adopted it without question, 
though he did not believe in a soul to migrate. 
Again, salvation according to his system logically 
meant complete annihilation; but when asked, 
Buddha himself refused to decide the question 
whether nirvana meant total extinction or an un- 
ending state of unconscious bliss. The latter 
view would have been identical with the Vedan- 
tic conception of Brahma, in which the individual 
soul is merged on attaining salvation; but it 
would be illogical in Buddhism, which acknow- 
ledges neither an individual nor a supreme soul. 

In Buddhism, which after an existence of 
more than a thousand years in India, finally 
disappeared from its native land, its original 
doctrine regarding the conditions after death 
was too abstract to satisfy the cravings of the 
ordinary man and soon came to be modified. 
Similarly the impersonal pantheism of the 
Upanishads, which was philosophically elabo- 
rated in the Vedanta system, became a personal 
pantheism, associated with a partially trans- 
formed polytheism, in Hinduism, from the 
centuries preceding our era down to the present 
day. 

The earliest form of this new religion we find 
represented in the great epic called the Maha- 
bharata, which assumed its present form probably 


66 Immortality 


about 400 a.p. Here the figures of the Vedic 
gods still appear, but Vishnu and Siva, who 
formerly occupied quite a subordinate position, 
have now attained a pre-eminent rank, which 
they have held ever since. They are super- 
imposed upon the older worship of Brahma in 
such a manner that, though they are still dif- 
ferent gods, each in turn represents the All-god. 
The Vishnuite form of this personal pantheism 
is glorified in the Bhagavad-gitd, the “Song of 
the Blessed one,” the most famous poem in 
Sanskrit literature, imbedded in the Maha- 
bharata as an episode of that epic. Here the 
tad “‘that,’’ the neuter pronoun which in the 
Upanishads is used to designate the absolute 
brahma, always appears as the personal He to 
express Krishna, Vishnu’s Avatar or incarnation. 
Immortality is obtained in “heaven”’ by doing 
one’s duty without attachment to the fruits of 
action, and being thus delivered from the bonds 
of rebirth. But it is otherwise also described 
as entry into or absorption in the supreme soul. 
In the Bhagavad-gita there first appears in its 
developed form the doctrine of bhakti, or faith- | 
ful devotion to the deity, which became the 
key-note of all the popular sectarian forms of 
worship which grew up in later centuries and 
have prevailed down to the present day. Faith 
now took the place of knowledge which, accord- 


Immortality in Indian Thought 67 


ing to all the philosophical systems, was neces- 
sary for the attamment of absorption in the 
supreme soul, that is, immortality. 

In the epic Mahabharata, in which the Bha- 
gavad-gita is an episode, we find the two Vedic 
gods Vishnu and Rudra (now generally called 
Siva), holding a position of predominance, 
shared by Brahma, the father-god of the pre- 
vious period. They are still distinguished from 
one another, without even forming any kind of 
recognized group. But in the period following 
the Great Epic, that is from about the fifth 
century A.D. onwards, to which belong the sec- 
tarian secondary epics called Puranas, each of 
these three gods, though Brahma is here of 
comparatively little account, becomes the centre 
of exclusive sectarian devotion. All three com- 
bined now come to be regarded in the light of a 
Trinity in which each deity is equal to each of 
the other two, and each represents the Supreme 
Being. Beside the Trinity, the old pantheon, 
somewhat modified by the disappearance of 
some and the addition of other deities, con- 
tinued to be acknowledged and worshipped. 
It is impossible here to follow the ramifications 
of the two main sects of the Vishnuites and the 
Sivaites, or of the separate worship of such deities 
as the elephant-headed Ganapati, Skanda the 
god of war, Sirya the sun-god, and Hanuman 


68 Immortality 


the monkey-god. Suffice it to say that modern 
Hinduism is still a polytheistic religion like that 
of the oldest Veda to which it goes back. But it 
is more specialised by being devoted to the 
worship of particular gods, chiefly of one of the 
two who are pre-eminent, and by being qualified 
by the popular theism resulting from the philo- 
sophic pantheism of the Upanishads which arose 
before the spread of Buddhism. It thus com- 
bines the views of immortality which prevailed 
in the two phases through which Indian religion 
has passed during a period of more than three 
thousand years. 


Hebrew and Apocalyptic Conceptions 
of Immortality 


ADAM C. WELCH, D.D. 


Professor of Hebrew and Old Testament Exegesis, 
Edinburgh. 


THE mourning customs of old Israel prove that 
the people, like all early peoples, believed in the 
continued existence of the spirit after death; 
they also give evidence of the prevalence of a 
cult devoted to the dead. The ultimate place 
of the departed was Sheol, which was conceived 
as a vast grave in the depths of the earth. Into 
this all spirits without exception were gathered. 
Certain distinctions prevailed among them, but 
these were either the same as had existed in their 
lifetime or were due to accidents at burial. 
There was no reversal of conditions in Sheol, and 
especially there was no reversal on the ground 
of moral conduct. The conditions of earth 
were continued, except that all life was lowered 
in quality. Life in Sheol was a shadowy exist- 
ence, cut off from all the interests which made 
69 


70 Immortality 


up life on earth, and in particular cut off from 
all relation to Yahweh. 

Yet this cessation of all relation to Yahweh 
did not imply that His power was confined to 
the upper world. He was able to revive the 
dead, if He would; t only He did not choose to 
do so, unless in exceptional cases. A prophet ? 
could say that even if men tried to find refuge 
from God in Sheol, “thence shall mine hand 
take them.’ Sheol was not without His reach, 
and the dead there did not pass under the con- 
trol of another deity. 

This was the background against which the 
revealed religion of Israel, its Yahweh faith, 
was set, and in one form or another it persisted 
to the end. Now, on one side the higher religion 
could have no quarrel with the idea of the 
continuance of life after death. So far as life 
of a kind was believed to continue in Sheol, there 
was nothing in the thought to offend. The one 
place where at first the higher faith came into 
collision with the earlier forms of belief was in 
connection with the people’s mourning customs; 
and here it made a significant difference. All 
these customs which implied no more than the 
belief in a continuance of the spirit after death 
were quietly left alone; but every practice which 
seemed to suggest the belief in any other god 


tT Deut. xxxii, 39. 2 Amos ix, 2. 


Hebrew and Apocalyptic Conceptions 71 


than Yahweh having power in Sheol, or which 
could be construed to mean a cult connected 
with the dead, was put under the ban. These 
were proscribed as emphatically as the arts of 
necromancy which implied the possibility of 
consulting the dead or the powers which pre- 
sided over death. Yahweh alone must be 
acknowledged by the Israelite, whether in life 
or in death. 

On the other hand, it was obvious that the 
higher religion could not be finally satisfied with 
the thought of a life after death which simply 
maundered on without ever reaching any moral 
end. Mere existence without spiritual content 
and without moral issue, could not ultimately 
fulfil the greatness of a faith which was teaching 
Israel that its life on earth became full of endur- 
ing content as soon as It accepted the standards 
and served the purposes of Yahweh. The higher 
faith had no real interest in the thought of con- 
tinuing to exist for ever, unless existence meant 
something more than the vague, half-personal, 
half-conscious continuance in Sheol. The two 
conceptions of life were not so much contra- 
dictory; but they represented different ideas 
of life, moved on different planes and had no 
real point of contact. 

What the higher religion needed to do was to 
think out what was implied for the personal life 


72 Immortality 


in its faith in a God who had a purpose in all His 
creation, and who revealed this to His creatures 
that they might welcome and live by it. Only 
it was slow to develop its own definite teaching 
on the great subject. Partly this may have 
been due to the fact that the leaders of the 
people in spiritual things needed first to bend 
their whole strength to fill the national life with 
the sense of the uniqueness and the sufficiency 
of Yahweh, and to convince men that life on 
this side of time was only full and worthy when 
it accepted His standards and sought to serve 
His will. The community claimed and received 
the first attention from Israel’s religious teach- 
ers; and the individual was left unshepherded. 
Partly also it was due to the fact that Israel in 
its great religious minds was never given to 
speculation. Its religious thinking was rooted 
continually in experience. Devout men, who 
held firmly the faith in a God who revealed His 
will as a guide and inspiration of conduct, were 
bringing its cardinal principles to bear on the 
life men lived in the flesh. They were insisting 
that the divine standards were the only ones 
which could give men foothold in this unstable 
world. The question of the future could wait 
till men, who had found the depth of their rela- 
tion to God and the value which a life lived in 
that relation gave to the soul which had com- 


Hebrew and Apocalyptic Conceptions 73 


mitted itself to it, found that this relation, being 
the profoundest thing in the world, could not be 
brought to an end by the accident of time. 

But, whatever were the reasons for the situa- 
tion, it is clear that in old Israel there were 
many ardent adherents of Yahweh, who found 
in their relation to their God that which made 
life real to them and yet who dumbly acquiesced 
in the view that, when this life was over, they 
passed away, not only from the sweet sun and 
from human fellowship, but from the conscious 
presence of God. Thus several of the psalmists ' 
limit their expectation of God’s presence and 
help to this side of time. When they pass away 
out of life, they pass out of the conscious care 
of their God. At times they say this quietly 
without a whimper. Indeed, since man’s life 
is at once so short and so futile, the author of 
Ps. xc prays for grace not to spend its few days 
in folly, but to win from it what alone it can 
give, a wise heart. 

Such an attitude may seem to us almost in- 
credible in its calm resignation, but we need to 
recall to mind the amazing power of resignation 
in the Jew and the content of what the men 
believed. Faith sustains, not in virtue of its 
limitations, but of its content; and the men’s 
faith was full of rich, positive content. The 

t Cf. e.g. Ps. xc, 1-12, and more definitely xxx, 9. 


74 Immortality 


writer of Ps. xc, e.g. believed himself to be in 
close personal relation to God, for he could pray 
te Him, and he expected an answer. What he 
needed was divine guidance on the one sure 
path through this brief and unstable world. 
There was such a path, and into it God brought 
the wayward, stumbling feet of men who looked 
to Him for guidance, for God would give the 
suppliant a wise heart. But such a way, revealed 
in answer to a man’s prayer, could not lead down 
into the cul-de-sac of Sheol. The implications 
of that calm, clear faith must unfold themselves 
to men who held it. 

The movement followed two main lines— 
what such a faith implies for the continuance of 
the soul which in this life can find God, and 
what a God who brings the soul into conscious 
relation to Him must do for its salvation. In 
the end these run into one, but, for clearness of 
thought, can-be studied separately, ds they are 
represented in the psalmists and prophets re- 
spectively. 

Thus the prophets approach everything from 
the side of God. In all he does, God does not 
act capriciously, but has a purpose which is the 
expression of His nature. In His sovereign 
erace He chose Israel in order that the nation 
might do His will. But Israel, as a nation, 
failed to fulfil the will of its Creator. In the © 


Hebrew and Apocalyptic Conceptions 75 


interests of the end for which He brought the 
nation into being Yahweh rejected Israel. He 
threw aside His chosen instrument. But the 
divine end itself, for which Israel was chosen, 
could not be fully served by the mere rejection 
of an imperfect instrument. It must find some 
more fitting means to fulfil itself in the world.: 
Besides, there was a reason why the nation failed 
to fulfil the divine ends. They were seen to be 
such as no nation, gud nation, could fulfil. The 
relation into which God entered with men was 
so intimate and the standards He required them 
to maintain were so personal that no body of 
men, who were bound together by the accidents 
of birth or language or history, could maintain 
them. Only those who were united by a com- 
mon conviction could be expected to maintain 
so great a task.2, The remnant, i.e. the men 
who committed themselves deliberately to the 
divine standards, were God’s instruments to 
serve His ends in the world. As such, they were 
His in an intimacy of relation which other men 
could not know. But since the standards they 
maintained were not of their own creation, but 
were divine, since they expressed God’s mind 
for the world and so were immutable, when men 
committed themselves to these, they belonged 


‘ That is the message of Amos. 
?’'That is the burden of Hosea. 


76 Immortality 


to the world which was beyond time. They 
were secure and victors over this world of sense. 
Thus the individual came to his own through 
the prophetic thought, and through no accident 
in Israel’s history. Only community of con- 
viction could bind together men who were to 
serve the divine ends by holding aloft in a care- 
less world the divine standards. The nation 
could supply a bag to hold peas together; only 
common conviction could make life organic. 

To the community, constituted on this basis, 
God would give the victory. Because the 
standards they confessed were real, were indeed 
the only real things in a transient world, these 
must some day manifest themselves as what they 
were. In the day of Yahweh, when the present 
order of the world came to an end and God 
revealed behind the falsities of time the eternal 
truth, the kingdom based on these standards 
should stand up clear. Whatever had obscured 
them should be done away and whatever opposed 
them should be destroyed, for, when Yahweh 
revealed Himself, only that which expressed 
His mind could continue. 

All this, said the prophets, should be on this 
side of time. In place of this world of moral 
chaos should come God’s world of moral order; 
there should be a new heaven and a new earth 


t That is the contribution of Isaiah. 


Hebrew and Apocalyptic Conceptions 77 


wherein dwelt righteousness. The prophets 
believed in a new order which was to appear in 
this earth, because to them God brought the 
world, as well as man into being, and brought 
it into being to manifest His will. The fulness 
of the whole earth was God’s glory. It, like 
man, had for a time been turned aside from its 
true end through the moral confusion which 
reigned init. But in His day, when God revealed 
Himself, it should all return to the order which 
was eternal, because it was that which was in 
God’s mind when He created it. a 

Into this new world, so constituted, should 
pass all who had lived by its principles. The 
men who had committed themselves to the 
divine order as that which alone was real should 
have freedom of entry into God’s new earth. 
They were already living after its standards; 
and when the day came and the earth was 
renewed, they should be confessed as what they 
were, citizens of the kingdom of God. 

But two questions became at once insistent 
here. What of those who had lived by these 
standards, and had died before the kingdom 
was established? Was the mere accident of 
time to make frustrate the fact that they had 
lived for, and might even have died for, the 
principles which were now finally vindicated? 
And what of the kingdom itself? Was it, with 


78 Immortality 


those who made it up, to be eternal, or was it 
still to be at the mercy of death? A little 
apocalypse * said boldly that in the consumma- 
tion Yahweh should swallow up death for ever— 
the kingdom with all its citizens was eternal. 
But it also declared that He should not forget 
the lives which had committed themselves to 
Him, though they had been mastered by death. 
The faithful departed should be restored to have 
their portion in the kingdom for which they had 
lived. Their trust in its reality should be 
vindicated, for in the consummation they should 
be brought back from the dead to share in 
eternal life. 

Now two things are noteworthy here. The 
first is that, because of the line along which he 
approached the whole question, the Jew natural- 
ly came to believe in the resurrection of the body. 
Since the kingdom was to be on earth, the dead 
must be brought back in bodily form in order 
that they might take part in it. There is no 
hint in Old Testament teaching of the soul as a 
divine spark, prisoned for a time in a house of 
clay and set free from the taint of matter by the 
liberating hand of death. Death remained to 
the Hebrew a tremendous reality, even the 
supreme indignity. Instead he believed in 
resurrection to a glorified human life through 


* Isaiah xxiv-xxvii. Note especially xxv, 7, 8; xxvi, 11-21. 


Hebrew and Apocalyptic Conceptions 79 


the power of God. Yet this does not imply a 
belief in conditional immortality. The unfaith- 
ful dead were left in Sheol, and, while the life 
in Sheol was merely shadowy, it remained at 
least life and was not annihilation. But, because 
the Jew in his thought on the subject was im- 
pelled, not by speculation but by religion, he 
formulated no scheme about the dead in general; 
what he thought of was the relation of the faith- 
ful dead to Yahweh. God could not leave them 
to Sheol, because He was faithful. Sheol was 
no fitting place for any except those who had 
been able to endure life in this world without 
God. 

And that leads to the second feature in this 
teaching. The share of the faithful in the 
kingdom was not primarily conceived as an act 
by which God made good to those who had not 
received the due reward of their faithfulness 
during their lifetime. The next world did not 
supply a mere system of rewards and punish- 
ments, for the prophets approached the ques- 
tion from a different angle. To them this was 
no vindication of the righteous; it was the self- 
revelation of God. God revealed the principles 
of His government of the world, and the ends 
for which He brought it into being. When He 
thus manifested His eternal purpose He took to 
Himself all His own. 


80 Immortality 


The psalmists were led to a similar conclusion 
by a somewhat different road. They came by 
way of the recognition of what is involved in the 
life of the soul with God. As, in the chances 
and changes of this mortal life, they found in 
the hidden life of the spirit that which gave them 
the victory over the world, they found them- 
selves set beyond the fear of death; nothing had 
been able in life to separate them from God, and 
death was equally impotent. Already the sense 
of the intimacy of the relation which God made 
possible for men had won for the individual his 
place. No nation could love and serve God 
with the entire surrender which was the demand 
and the dignity of the religious life. Hence a 
psalmist became able to write * a hymn of what 
the old theologians called providentia special- 
isissima. The soul which had set its love on 
God was preserved in all its mortal course from 
perils by day and night, from dangers by flood 
and field. Stated with the uncompromising 
directness which appears in the psalm, the posi- 
tion can be easily laughed out of court with the 
remark that life contradicts it, since the lion will 
tear and the snake will sting the godly as readily 
as the godless. But the perennial truth in the 
doctrine of a special providence is the infinite 
worth of a soul which in this transient life can 


tIn Ps. xci. 


Hebrew and Apocalyptic Conceptions 81 


reach up to God. God has revealed something 
of Himself to it, and the relation has become so 
deep and intimate as to be set above the acci- 
dents of time. Israel reached this faith in the 
psalm, though it had not yet applied it to the 
question whether that relation was at the mercy 
of death. 

The writer of Ps. xxiii occupies practically the 
same position. The mystery of this world which 
seems so indifferent to good and evil, where God 
might appear to stand aloof and suffer bad men 
to enjoy what the conscience of His true servants 
has forbidden them to take, has almost over- 
whelmed him. He has been seriously tempted 
to let everything go and fall back to the kind of 
life with which the godless were content. But 
he found that for his part he could not do it. 
He could only have the outward rewards at a 
price which it was wholly beyond his power to 
pay; he should need to surrender what alone 
gave life any meaning to him, his personal rela- 
tion to God. And he stated what to him was 
life indeed: ‘‘ Nevertheless, continually, O Lord, 
I am with Thee.”’ Such a saying has immortal- 
ity implicit in it. For the true life was this, 
and it was already his. So great and sure was 
it that he could not, for anything which could 
be offered, give it up. Some day the other side 
of the truth must reveal itself, viz., that this 


82 Immortality 


life was what God meant for men and that He 
could not give them up. This life with God 
alone had reality, and all that was real must 
endure for ever. 

It will be noted that neither psalmist turns his 
thoughts to the question of immortality, and, 
however much the second writer’s conclusion 
holds immortality implicitly involved in it, it 
cannot be said that the conclusion is directly 
drawn. But the writer of Ps. xvi comes still 
nearer, in the saying, ““Yahweh will not leave 
his soul to Sheol, nor suffer His saint to see the 
pit.” Again, it must be acknowledged that this 
may be taken to involve no more than that God 
will deliver him from the sickness which threat- 
ens to end in death and will bring him back 
from the very portals of the grave. Each reader 
will interpret the utterance through the precon- 
ceptions which he brings to it. But the life 
about which the psalmist has been speaking is 
so much more than mere existence—it is a life 
in the conscious enjoyment of God’s favour and 
- one which is capable of the vision of God—that 
a petition for a little longer period on this side 
of time seems far too jejune a conclusion. What 
he is conscious of is that he is in the hands of 
One who loves life and who makes the life He 
loves full of rich and significant content. So, if 
he has not quite spoken out the master-word 


Hebrew and Apocalyptic Conceptions 83 


of immortality, he has certainly set the convic- 
tions which imply it and which alone give it 
much content and any security, over against the 
one supreme experience which seems to contra- 
dict them, death which threatens to turn all 
such convictions to nothing. The wall between 
his thought and the assurance of immortality 
has worn so thin that it needs no more than a 
touch to pierce it. 

That touch is given in the following psalm. 
Its writer has again been troubled by the appar- 
ent contradiction which life offers to any divine 
standards and values. Bad men by their success 
seem to prove that these standards have no real 
force or foundation. And he has fallen back on 
the old answer faith offers to such whispers of 
fear. For himself he can do no other than live 
by the vision of God; life is empty to him with- 
out it, while with it life becomes real. Indeed, 
its reality is such that nothing can destroy it, 
for even what seems to bring it to an end shall 
be proved powerless. Death, when it comes, 
will be but a sleep and I, when I awake, shall 
gaze my fill on God. 

So large a conclusion from such a slight saying 
might seem perilous if the utterance stood alone 
in the psalm, but xlix, 15, e.g., can mean nothing 
else. Here again the writer is contrasting the 
lot of the sinner and the saint, but in his case the 


84. Immortality 


representation of the fate of sinners turns en- 
tirely round their final state, not their temporary 
condition; death shall be their shepherd. Hence 
it is natural to conclude that, when he turns to 
the condition of the faithful soul, he cannot be 
thinking merely of their temporary deliverance 
from sickness or from the danger of death. His 
mind in both cases is dwelling on the final end, 
and he is assured that God will deliver his soul 
from the power of Sheol, because He will receive 
him. The relation between the faithful and God 
is one which death cannot destroy. Whether, 
however, he is assured of resurrection or of such 
deliverance from death as was given to Elijah 
is not so clear, and is indeed a purely academic 
question. For what is most important in his 
utterance is that he has become conscious of a 
life with God which cannot come to an end 
through the accident of death. How it is to be 
made triumphant he leaves and is content to 
leave with God. He in whom he trusts is able 
to meet every difficulty and to overcome. * 

It will be noted that, because the prophets 
believed in a kingdom which God should set 


t Nothing has been said about the question as it presents itself 
in Job. Personally I think that such a passage as xix, 26 can only 
be fairly interpreted as implying not only immortality, but resur- 
rection. Yet the relative texts in the book are so justly debatable 
that they can only be used after a discussion which would have been 
too technical and long for a paper of this nature. 


Hebrew and Apocalyptic Conceptions 85 


up on the earth, their thought of immortality 
involved resurrection by which the faithful 
returned to share in the life God made possible 
for His own. The psalmists, however, urging 
that the relation between God and the saint was 
too enduring to be brought to an end by death, 
could believe in immortality which ignored 
resurrection. But, because both prophets and 
psalmists come to the question as a religious 
question, concerned with God and the faithful 
soul, in neither is there any teaching of reward 
or punishment in Sheol. Indeed, Sheol remains 
what it has always been; only it has no power 
over those who have committed themselves to 
God. As for those who have had no real relation 
to God in this life, they need not cease to be, 
but they pass at death into the dim waste land 
into which shall drift down all the wreckage 
from time’s sea. 

Nowhere, indeed, in the Old Testament is 
there any teaching of hell as a place of punish- 
ment, for Sheol retains to the end its original 
non-ethical character. Even Dan. xi, 2, 3, 
which speaks definitely of resurrection and 
which, in particular, expects the resurrection of 
a select number of the wicked in order that they 
may receive punishment, says nothing whatever 
about their final punishment. Whether they 
are to be brought up from Sheol that they may 


86 Immortality 


receive a dramatic penalty for their deeds and 
then relegated to Sheol itself as their final abode, 
or what becomes of them after this punishment 
is not even hinted at. Nor is there anything 
in the book which can help to clearer under- 
standing of the author’s meaning. Whether he 
expects all smners to be restored to life, or merely 
looks that those who have been specially heinous 
transgressors shall be selected to receive special 
treatment, is left entirely uncertain. The vague 
nature of the obiter dictum makes it clear that 
men were thinking gravely over the question 
but leaves it an open matter as to the conclu- 
sions at which they had arrived. All that is 
said is perfectly consistent with the view that 
the writer held the usual view of Sheol as a 
place of life at its lowest quality into which 
departed all sinners of mankind. Like all Old 
Testament teaching on the subject, the book 
seems to confine itself to the mstant conviction 
that God, because He is God and because the 
souls of the righteous are His, will not leave 
them where they can no longer be in the con- 
scious sense of His care. 

It will, accordingly, be noted, and cannot be 
too emphatically insisted on, that at the close of 
the Old Testament canon immortality was not 
a doctrine definitely held and taught by Judaism, 
as e.g. the unity of God was held and taught. It 


Hebrew and Apocalyptic Conceptions 87 


was rather the necessary consequence of the 
convictions on the nature of God which the Jew 
believed; as such, its force was only felt by men 
who profoundly shared these convictions. Hence 
the faith in immortality only made its way 
among the men who were religiously alive. The 
Sadducees, who properly speaking never were a 
religious party, but who merely represented the 
somewhat worldly, slightly indifferent section 
which appears on the fringe of every religious 
community, were not interested in the question 
at all. For their part, they held by no such 
new-fangled doctrines; the old unethical idea 
of Sheol satisfied men who were not greatly 
troubled about ethics. But, further, the con- 
viction brought great difficulty to that other 
section of opinion, which is also found in every 
communion, the body of sincere men who love 
established opinions, who like to see the articles 
of their faith in “black and white’? and who 
look with some suspicion on everyone who insists 
that a living faith must have the courage to 
transform its temporary expression in obedience 
to the guidance of its inward principles. How- 
ever much these men may have felt the at- 
traction of the thought of immortality, and 
however much they might recognise that it was 
the inevitable outcome of convictions which they 
shared, they could not find it within the boards 


88 Immortality 


of the now forming canon. It was not definitely 
taught within the four corners of the Law. And 
it is interesting to notice that those who accepted 
it, yet who felt the difficulty thus presented, 
adopted the familiar methods which appear in 
such circumstances. By strained interpretation 
of Scripture texts they tried to extract the 
doctrine of resurrection from passages into 
which they had first conveyed it.? 

This shows of course that the doctrine was 
felt to be a novelty, was regarded in many 
quarters with suspicion and needed proof of its 
connection with the inherited Jewish faith. But 
there is not wanting evidence that it was not 
only accepted at once by certain circles of 
opinion, but was early made the basis of prac- 
tices which had no meaning except in its light, 
for mention is made of a sacrificial sin-offering 
on behalf of the dead.2. Where, however, it 
found most ready acceptance was among the 
apocalyptists and the wide body which they 
influenced. For these men’s piety was less legal 


t The most charming and touching illustration of this procedure is 
found in the Book of Adam and Eve. There we have the patent 
desire to insert the doctrine of resurrection into the original narrative 
of the fall. The writer stresses that man, being in the image of God, 
cannot be doomed to final death, and offers an ingenious exegesis 
of Gen. iii, 19. Cf. his chap. xxvii and xxviii, and cf. the similar 
method of proof in St. Luke xx, 37 ff. 

22 Maccab. xii, 43. 


Hebrew and Apocalyptic Conceptions 89 


and less traditional, and, since they had in- 
herited the hopes of the prophets, they naturally 
continued a teaching which had an integral 
relation with the prophetic thought. All the 
apocalyptists deal with immortality in one 
form or another. Because, however, it was not 
yet framed into a coherent dogma, it could be 
and was presented in the most diverse shapes, 
and its implications are followed out and efforts 
made to determine their scope. Thus, when 
immortality was conceived as resurrection and 
this remained closely allied with a Messianic 
kingdom which was to appear on earth, the 
question naturally arose as to what was the 
condition of faithful souls during the inter- 
mediate period before that kingdom was set up. 
An intermediate state before the final judgment 
is frequently taught, which may be a condition 
of purifying pain,* or about which it is merely 
said that prayers and sacrifice avail for those 
who are consigned to it,? or which is represented 
as a state of reward and punishment preliminary 
to the final decision. 3 

Again, the prophets had taught the resurrec- 
tion of the faithful dead and of these alone to 
share in the kingdom. Hence it is sometimes 


t In the Book of Adam and Eve. 
2In 2 Maccab. 
3In the Apocalypse of Baruch and 4 Ezra. 


90 Immortality 


taught that only Israelites shall rise from the 
dead,* or even only the righteous in Israel,? and 
again held that all without exception shall rise 
again.? But while some of these writers remain 
content with the earthly kingdom and believe 
that it shall continue for ever,‘ all do not retain 
this conception. The thought of the psalmists 
did not necessarily involve a Messianic or an 
earthly kingdom at all, and this side of Jewish 
piety was strengthened by the nation’s inter- 
course with Greek teaching and thought on the 
subject. Some of the books retain the essentially 
Hebrew Messianic kingdom, but regard it as 
merely temporary,’ while a number omit this 
feature altogether. The same uncertainty ap- 
pears as to bodily resurrection, and for the 
same reason. Bodily resurrection was inte- 
erally related to a kingdom on earth, and so 
was frequently retained;® but, where the 
earthly kingdom disappeared, this often gave 
place to immortality. The Apocalypse of 
Baruch even teaches a resurrection into earthly 


t Assumption of Moses and part of Enoch. 

22 Maccab. and Sections 4 and 5 of Enoch. 

3 Testaments of Twelve Patriarchs, Book of Adam and Eve, 
Apocalypse of Baruch. 

4Testaments of Twelve Patriarchs, 2 Maccab. 

5 Book of Jubilees, Apocalypse of Baruch, 4 Ezra. 

6 Most of Enoch, 2 Maccab., Adam and Eve, Apocalypse of 
Baruch. 


Hebrew and Apocalyptic Conceptions 91 


bodies, which are to be changed into heavenly 
bodies. 

Perhaps the profoundest change which was 
brought about in the post-Biblical period was 
that Sheol was transformed into a place of pun- 
ishment. Here again, however, the teaching 
varies. The penalty in Sheol is almost always 
penalty, but sometimes it is conceived as 
eternal,‘ sometimes it is capable of being inter- 
preted as resulting in destruction,? which is left 
indeterminate. 

When one sets these variant opinions down, 
as I have attempted above, the result may seem 
to some minds to be nothing except confused 
guesses and hopeless uncertainty. But, if they 
be grouped and thought over in connection with 
the presuppositions as to Sheol, as to the Mes- 
sianic earthly kingdom, and as to the survival 
of death which the men brought from their Old 
Testament, it will be seen that there is here 
the eager effort of men who believed in a living 
God and a living religion to explore with rever- 
ence the implications of their historical and 
ancestral faith on the subject. Post-canonical 
Judaism was not an ‘ism at all. It was not a 
series of dogmas, firmly held and clearly defined. 


t Apocalypse of Baruch, 4 Maccab., Secrets of Enoch. 
2Psalms of Solomon, perhaps Enoch, Wisdom of Solomon, 4 
Ezra. 


92 Immortality 


Within certain clearly defined limits the men 
who composed it were singularly free in their 
thought and used their freedom; and especially 
they used it on the great but uncertain subject 
of the destiny of the individual soul. 


The Christian Idea of Immortality 


Ronatp G. Macintyre, M.A., D.D. 


Professor of Systematic Theology St. Andrew’s College, 
University of Sydney. 


In the limited space at my disposal some things. 
which ought to be said, and without which any 
statement of the Christian idea of immortality 
is necessarily incomplete, have to be omitted; 
while, on the other hand, statements require to- 
be made which call for evidence or argument 
which cannot here be supplied. Under the con- 
ditions of this volume that is inevitable. Fur- 
ther, the purpose of this essay is not to give 
an historical statement, or a Biblico-exegetical 
study, but to make a positive statement of 
Christian thought on the future life, as that 
thought has grown out of the undeveloped and 
sometimes confusing teaching of the New Testa- 
ment.'* 

The Christian doctrine on immortality has its 

«The writer may be permitted to refer for fuller statement and 
discussion to his volume, The Other Side of Death. 

93 


94 Immortality 


basis in the New Testament, which we accept 
as the general form for Christian thought. 
That Christian doctrine did not originate in 
vacuo. It has its roots in preceding Hebrew 
thought on the after-life, but as a trickling 
stream half hidden in the undergrowth of pagan 
Semitism, coming out into the sunlight in a few 
Psalms and in the Book of Job, passing into 
the dense marshland of the apocalyptic period, 
and emerging into New Testament times a 
somewhat turgid stream with luxuriant if not 
healthy growth along its banks. Now we must 
bear in mind that the waters of a river carry 
down with them something of the back-country 
through which they flowed, and in human 
thought it 1s psychologically impossible, even if 
it were desirable, to make a clean break with the 
ideas and forms of expression of a preceding age. 
This fact is persistently forgotten in the formu- 
lation of Christian doctrine, and nowhere has it 
produced more disastrous results than in the 
doctrine of the Last Things. Traditional ortho- 
doxy on this subject has in it some things which 
we cannot believe, some which we feel we ought 
not to believe, and even some which call for 
emphatic denial. These are mainly survivals 
of crude Jewish thought dyed in Babylonish- 
Persian colours, or, in later ages, the precipitate 
of Roman law and medieval jurisprudence. 


The Christian Idea of Immortality 95 


The apocalyptic literature of the two centuries 
B.c. concerned itself largely with what we may 
call the topography and climate of heaven and 
hell, and the Christian doctrine of the first 
century could not avoid using familiar forms of 
expression or carrying over some ideas. We can 
see illustrations of this in the parable of Dives 
and Lazarus, where heaven and hell are within 
hail of one another, divisions of the Hebrew 
Sheol, or when the crass materialism of primitive 
eschatology accepted the penalty of sin to be 
fire and brimstone, burning bodies which had 
physical powers of suffermg with asbestos qual- 
ity of endurance, or when Paul speaks of the 
‘third’? heaven, or refers to “the man of sin.”’ 
The unfortunate thing is that literalism applied to 
the Bible under a mistaken theory of inspiration 
has incorporated these flights of Jewish imagi- 
nation into Christian teaching, and imposed 
them upon the Church as tests of orthodoxy; 
but oriental imagery and the materialisation 
of the spiritual should no longer be permitted 
to occupy the large place they do in our con- 
ception of the future life. At the same time 
one cannot but feel, when passing from Jewish 
apocalyptism to the New Testament how much 
has been left behind. It is like passing from 
the humid enervating atmosphere of a hot-house 
to the fresh sun-laden air of the open heath. 


96 Immortality 


Another fact has also to be realised. In the 
New Testament we are dealing with undeveloped 
teaching as to the Last Things. What Professor 
A. B. Bruce has said of St. Paul is true generally 
of the New Testament. “‘On no subject was St. 
Paul, in his way of thinking, more a man of his 
time than on that of eschatology. And on no 
subject is it more difficult for one influenced by 
the modern spirit to sympathise with, or even to 
understand, the Apostle.”’ * Lucidity of thought 
and definiteness of statement come from conflict 
either within the individual personality or in the 
community. Certain matters, such as the sig- 
nificance of a crucified Messiah, or the relation 
of the Christian salvation to the Mosaic ritual 
law, were what we term “burning questions.” 
It was not so with eschatology as a whole. 
Minor questions as to what would happen to 
Christians who died prior to the Parousia might 
arise, but Jewish eschatology served most of 
the religious needs of the Apostolic age. In the 
organic world evolutionary development is de- 
pendent on environmental stimulus. The same 
is true in the world of thought, and such stimulus 
was, on the whole, lacking as to the subject of 
immortality. There is abundance of reference 
to the End, but everything is overshadowed by 
the expectation of the near advent of the Lord 

t St. Paul's Conception of Christianity, p. 379. 


The Christian Idea of Immortality 97 


Jesus. Immature as the doctrine is in the New 
Testament regarding the content of the future 
life it is quite definite and clear as to the fact of 
personal immortality. Scripture recognises that 
man is a spiritual bemg, and belongs to the 
moral order of the universe. 

The purely naturalistic view of man regards 
him as a merely superior animal, which projects 
its own fantastic wishes on to the unknown, and 
then draws them back as objective realities dis- 
tinct from itself, their true creator. The 
Christian view, on the other hand, with its 
belief in a supreme personal Being who has 
revealed Himself in the beauty and order of the 
world, in saints and prophets, and finally in His 
Son Jesus Christ, bases all its hopes and thoughts 
upon that supernatural fact. Its doctrine of 
man as a self-conscious moral being makes him 
kin with God. /Man is part of the physical. 
world, in which he works out the purpose of God 
as a free agent though within the limits of a 
finite being. But he belongs essentially to the 
spiritual, and the spirit of man and the Spirit of 
God _ have relations of dependency and of obliga- 
ins is in this relationship to God who is 
Life that the Christian doctrine of immortality 
has its source and inspiration. 

To the Christian immortality is not simply 
continuance of existence. That aspect of it, 


98 immortality 


which may be called the metaphysical, has no 
interest for the Biblical writers. They have no 
philosophy of immortality and no metaphysic of 
the soul. It is existence with God, fellowship 
with Him, which creates the whole interest in a 
future life, ““we shall be like Him, for we shall 
see Him even as He is.”” That is, the specifically 
religious desire begins not with immortality but 
with God, and where it begins it ends. It had 
God first in its thoughts, and from this passed 
to a belief in immortality, but immortality of a 
special kind, “‘at home with the Lord,” a fellow- 
ship which implied a certain likeness of char- 
acter.. Immortality, and the point is worthy of 
note, is thus directly connected with redemption. 
Christianity, as the heir of Hebrew religion, has 
that profound sense of sin which recognises that 
it means separation from God, “‘be ye holy for I 
am holy.” Its ideal is “‘perfect as your Father in 
heaven is perfect.” It has not attempted to 
solve the problem of sin and evil speculatively, 
but from the religious point of view it has inten- 
sified its actuality. From the same point of 
view it seeks to overcome sin, and so “‘abolish 
death,” to do away with sin through a restora- 
tion of that fellowship with God, the loss of 
which is the last penalty of sin. No speculative 
discussion or argument can affect this experience 
of the soul, or explain away the profound reality 


The Christian Idea of Immortality 99 


of sin which can have this effect. ~Anapeda 
may be used by pagan Greek and by Christian, 
but they do not thereby mean the same thing. 
It is “‘missing the mark,” but not the same 
mark. To the Greek (though hardly to Plato or 
the Stoics) evil is more metaphysical than 
ethical, attaching itself to mere finiteness, or to 
some limiting principle called “matter.” To 
the Christian sin is not so much a breach of law 
as a violation of love, and consequently a loss of 
fellowship. The filial relation of God is every- 
thing to Christianity. Out of it grows all 
knowledge of God, and in fulfilment of it is all 
morality and life. To have this fellowship restored 
is wmmortality. It was not a restoration to the 
capacity for good, a faculty which man never 
lost, else were his case hopeless. Nor was it the 
mere dominance of the moral law, for “‘love is 
the fulfilment of law.” It was restoration to 
fellowship with God in and through Jesus Christ, 
a personal relationship which carried in it all 
else, morality and immortality, “‘ye will not 
come to me that ye may have life.” This new 
relationship, however, could not come by a 
gradual reformation of character, self-induced. 
It requires the imparting of a new principle of 
action, or rather the possession of a new life- 
giving power, a kind of new birth which would 
realise itself in conformity with its source in 


100 Immortality 


God, in short a Christ-likeness. A life thus 
redeemed has already in it the assurance of 
immortality, “he that believeth on the Son hath 
eternal life,’’ and is passing on to fulness of life, 
to “more abundance.” Immortality therefore 
in the Christian sense, is not due to any meta- 
physical quality of the soul, though this may be 
a basis for it, but to a personal holy relation to 
God, “‘because I live ye shall live also.” It is 
the concomitant of redemption. The philosophi- 
cal and ethical grounds for immortality are 
confirmatory of the Christian belief, but that 
belief itself rests on faith in God and the inward 
assurance of the spirit that the restoration of 
fellowship with God, through our divine Re- 
deemer, guarantees immortality. i It is the faith 
of the Psalmist enriched and assured. ‘Thou 
wilt not leave my soul in Sheol, netther wilt 
Thou suffer Thine holy one to see corruption.” 
This faith is not based upon any divine decree 
or arbitrary selection. Though not necessarily 
perceptible to all who hold it, it has its founda- 
tion in a profound sense of the permanency of 
moral values, and the immortality of love. To 
be in faith-union with God is to be like God, 
not in the attributes of omnipotence or omni- 
science but in His holy character. There is in 
the New Testament constant insistence upon 
the need for purity of heart and moral beauty of 


ee 


The Christian Idea of Immortality 101 


life, with stern warning of the reality of judg- 
ment, ““we must all be made manifest before the 
judgment seat of Christ; that each one may 
receive the things done in the body, according 
to what he hath done, whether it be good or 
bad,” “each man’s work shall be made manifest; 
for the day shall declare it, because it is revealed 
in fire; for the fire itself shall prove each man’s 
work, of what sort it is.”’ 

The Christian doctrine clearly rests upon a 
conception of values: and very specially in the 
mind and teaching of Jesus, though evident also 
in the Apostolic Epistles, is the conviction that 
the only thing of absolute value is character, 
seen in God and manifested in those whose life 
is united with Him in faith. To believe is to be 
good, “faith without works is dead,” “verily, 
verily, I say unto you, he that believeth on me, 
the works that I do shall he do also.” This 
supreme sense of the moral values of life, in- 
volved in faith in God, made Jesus independent 
of the material things of this life, not in the way 
of despising them, as in later asceticism, but in a 
comparative view of values. It is the basis of 
that serenity of spirit which no outward cir- 
cumstances could disturb. But, further, we 
must note that values exist only in relation to 
the life of the self, and therefore the preservation 
of these values involves the maintenance, in 


102 Immortality 


short the immortality, of the self. As such the 
soul of man has a worth which sets it above all 
finite existences. Because it was capable of this 
it was worth saving, even at the cost to the Son 
of God of the agony of Gethsemane and the cross 
of Cavalry. God would not let that perish which 
was of such intrinsic value in itself and to Him, 
and which has im it still higher possibilities of 
attainment, “for it is not yet made manifest 
what we shall be. We know that if He shall be 
manifested we shall be like Him.” We are saved 
not only for what we are, but for what we may 
become. 


Verdict which accumulates 

From lengthening scrolls of human fates, 
Saying, What is excellent, 

As God lives, is permanent. 


R. W. Emerson. 


This is even more evident when we grasp the 
idea of God as love, the all-embracive attribute 
of the Christian God. Love can never be indif- 
ferent to the fate of the loved, “‘God so loved 
the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, 
that whosoever believeth on Him should not 
perish, but have eternal life’; love cannot be 
other than redemptive in a sinful world. But 
love is never singular, it implies a social universe 
of personalities, ‘‘we love because He first loved 


oe 


The Christian Idea of Immortality 103 


33 


us.” It is a divine lesson by God who is love, 
carrying with it anew commandment, “Even as 
I have loved you, that ye also love one another.” 
Now, such a relationship, once established, must, 
if true to itself, go on, and go on as individual 
relationship. The idea of countless generations 
as mere stepping-stones to the attamment of an 
ultimate few, the last stage of an evolutionary 
process, may be true in the other and lower 
stages of organic life, but cannot be so for man 
as spirit, self-conscious and morally capable. 
That quality lifts him, not merely in type but 
as an individual, to a higher life where values 
cannot remain except as inhering in the individ- 
ual personality, though never wholly for himself. 
Nor can they be merely an enrichment of the 
Absolute, the All, for that would mean that God 
used man, all his suffering and all his discipline, 
as a means for His own enrichment. A selfish 
God and a God of love are a contradiction. The 
human individual is an end in himself, and it 
would be a denial of love to make him merely a 
means to an end in which he had no share. We 
ean see, therefore, that the revelation in Jesus 
Christ of what man is, and may become, and of 
what God is, involves nothing less than individ- 
ual immortality, not because of the degree of 
present human attainment, but because we 
have in some measure, possibly only in small 


104. Immortality 


measure, established a relationship which has 
joined us to a higher order of being, and which 
has in it “the power of an endless life.” 

From what has been said above it will be 
evident that Christianity can never accept any 
idea of immortality which makes it less than 
individual. The raindrop merged in the ocean, 
the eddy formed in the current and then disap- 
pearing, has nothing in common with the 
Christian hope. Dim as the idea of immortality 
may be in the Old Testament the religious con- 
ception rises above any thought of man as a 
mere organism, the dissolution of which carried 
with it the extinction of personality. It is true 
that Hebrew religion, turning away from a pagan 
Semitic eschatology, groped in the darkness, 
feeling after a kind of corporate immortality, so 
that the Israelite lived on in his children and 
his children’s children; but strange as it may 
seem to us with our exaggerated individualism, 
he did feel that he lived on. But the surge of 
his faith in God led him later to a recognition of 
individuality, and eventually to the idea of 
individual immortality. Yet we should never 
forget that if we are redeemed, it is as citizens ' 
of a Kingdom, members of a family, the sheep 
of a flock. The Christian scheme of life though 
individually conceived is socially conditioned. 

The basic principle on which the Christian idea 


The Christian Idea of Immortality 105 


of immortality is founded prepares us for the 
New Testament conception of it as throughout 
morally conditioned. Later Christian thought 
and authoritative credal statements have so far 
departed from the New Testament idea as to 
make the soul inherently immortal, constituted 
of such metaphysical simplicity that it does not 
admit of dissolution. If early Hebrew eschato- 
logy was all but submerged in pagan Semitism, 
and early Christian eschatology deeply dyed in 
Jewish apocalyptism, later ecclesiastical eschato- 
logy in common with theology as a whole floated 
in asea of platonic philosophy, which maintained 
the independent immortality of the soul. This 
is a view destitute of any foundation in the Bible 
and derived from Greek philosophy. An immor- 
tality morally conditioned does not admit of an 
immortality independently based upon some 
metaphysical quality of substance. We can ac- 
cept the teaching of modern science that man has 
evolved from lower forms of animal life, not only 
physically but psychically, but the main point is 
not where he has come from, or how he has come, 
but what he has become. He is the fruitage of 
a long process of evolution, who by virtue of his 
moral personality has passed out of the mere 
category of animal and become a member of 
that moral order which is the expression of the 
divine nature. But the process of human evolu- 


106 Immortality 


tion is not yet complete. Scientists * are point- 
ing out to us that the further development of 
man is not on the physical but on the psychic 
plane, his advance is become more spiritual, “to 
be spiritually minded is life and peace.’ This 
is not inevitable in every individual, no evolu- 
tionary process ever is, it is not compulsory, but 
with his own consent. It is his voluntary 
response to the stimulus of a spiritual environ- 
ment, towards a higher life, “God which worketh 
in you both to will and to work for His good 
pleasure.” This is the purpose of God for man, 
to this end God in Christ Jesus intervened in 
human history. “God was in Christ reconciling 
the world unto Himself.” Man was in the 
gravest danger, through the wrong exercise of 
his own free will, of ‘“‘missing the mark.’’ God’s 
purpose for him was otherwise, and the loving 
srace of God was and is revealed in Him who 
came “‘‘to reveal the Father”’ and who is Himself 
“the way and the truth and the life.”’ 

We are warned by Jesus Himself that im- 
mortality is through our own response to the 
call of God, “ye will not come unto me that ye 
may have life,’ “whosoever believeth on me 
shall never die.”” They who are “accounted 
worthy to attain”’ to that resurrection which is 


tE.g., J. Arthur Thomson and J. Young Simpson in recent 
books. 


The Christian Idea of Immortality 107 


life are not arbitrarily chosen by some irrational 
divine decree. They are those who abide in 
Him as the branch abideth in the vine. Any 
individual not in this living union with God in 
Christ “is cast forth as a branch and is with- 
ered.”’ And Paul is in accord with his Master, 
“For ye died and your life is hid with Christ in 
God,” but like every advance, from the pro- 
tozoa to man, it has to be striven for, and “strait 
is the gate and narrow is the way.” 

Traditional theology, with a strange disregard 
of the insistent teaching of the Bible, has taken 
the other view, that man is by his very nature 
immortal and must endure for ever in a state of 
bliss or a state of woe, and this view it has sought 
to impose upon the Bible and has inflicted upon 
the Church. In this matter we hold that the 
scientists have proven the better theologians. 
As one of them has recently said,* ““man is im- 
mortable rather than immortal, and can only 
realise his true destiny as he fulfils his place in 
the moral order.’’ This is not to say that man 
is at present the natural heir of death. That 
was the error of the “‘Conditionalism”’ asso- 
ciated with the name of Edward White. The 
biblical view, as we see it, especially in the mind 
of Jesus, is that man by his very nature is still 
capable of good, is in some measure good, and 

t Prof. J. Young Simpson. 


108 Immortality 


belongs to the order of the immortals, but that 
unless he makes his calling and election sure he 
will miss that for which God intended him, and 
which therefore is his true destiny. It is what 
the present writer has called elsewhere, ““poten- 
tial immortality,” a term which might well be 
substituted for the older and more barren phrase, 
“conditional immortality.”” Because immor- 
tality is something to be attained, because it has 
in it this high moral worth, and because it is 
fellowship with God, it is always spoken of in 
the Bible in glowing terms of desire. It is a 
great and high destiny to which through Christ 
Jesus the poorest outcast may attain. It is a 
“gain”? which is “far better” than anything this 
earthly life can offer. In the words of Professor 
H. R. MacKintosh,‘ “Immortality, in the char- 
acteristically Christian meaning of the word, 
may be truly described as conditional. No one 
can have it who is not united to Jesus by faith.” 
If there be any other kind of immortality the 
New Testament knows nothing of it. It would 
be “‘an empty abstract immortality” which is 
a contradiction in terms, and has no interest for 
Christian thought. 

This ‘‘characteristically Christian”? view of 
immortality raises another question which it is 
best to face quite frankly. It is a cardinal 

t Immortality and the Future, p. 219. 


The Christian Idea of Immortality 109 


principle of Christian doctrine that Jesus Christ 
is the supreme revelation of God the Father, as 
Jesus Himself has told us, “Neither doth any 
know the Father save the Son, and he to whom- 
soever the Son willeth to reveal Him.” The 
ultimate fate of every man is determined by the 
relation to God which is expressed in Jesus 
Christ. Traditional orthodoxy asserts this prin- 
ciple as a general statement, but seeks to save 
its eschatology from manifest injustice by pro- 
fessing that the vast majority of the human 
race will be judged by another standard, namely, 
conformity to “the law of nature,” the dim light 
of the moral law which still abides in every 
man’s conscience. It will in most cases require 
to be a very lax judgment to attain its object, 
but even this is a late modification of the old 
orthodoxy which consigned all such to eternal 
hell. But this modified orthodoxy is in danger 
of belittling the place of Jesus Christ in the 
divine economy of redemption, and making 
void the word of Scripture, “‘Neither is there 
any other name under heaven, that is given 
among men, wherein we must be saved.” The 
attempt to claim Paul’s support for their view is 
imposing upon that Apostle an idea which his 
whole teaching contradicts. We must take 
- account not only of the heathen who have never 
heard the name of Jesus but also of those within 


110 Immortality 


Christendom who have only had presented to 
them a distorted image of God and a defective 
Gospel, as well as of those who have not, prior 
to death, established any decisive relation for or 
against God, yet who have in them much that 
is good. Naturally and properly the urgency of 
the New Testament, as it must be of every 
preacher, is the tremendous issues of the present 
opportunity and the importance for the life to 
come of the life that now is. We are even now 
making character, the value or poverty of which 
we carry into the after-life, and it is a crisis when 
Jesus Christ stands knocking at the door of our 
heart. But we cannot ignore that fact that there 
are millions in every generation who have not 
seen the beauty of Christ; and who cannot be 
said to have definitely rejected the grace of God. 
What of such? If we limit ourselves to specific 
declarations of Holy Scripture, we have practi- 
cally no solution of a problem which in the 
expectation of the near Advent of the Lord and 
for other reasons did not interest the Apostolic 
writers. But if we take to heart the creative 
ideals of the New Testament, and treat these as 
guideposts of the Spirit to a pathway along 
which the Apostles travelled only a little way, 
we are warranted in believing that the work of 
divine grace does not suddenly cease because of 
a microbe in the blood which destroys this mortal 


The Christian Idea of Immortality 111 


frame, or a murderous bullet in the brain. On 
the view maintained by traditional orthodoxy 
the millions of immature characters with no 
decisive relation to Jesus Christ pass straightway 
to eternal torment. The tares and the wheat 
are burned together before the harvest of these 
lives is complete. No doctrine has any right to 
a place in the Christian scheme of thought which 
represents God other than we know Him in 
Jesus Christ. And what God is as revealed in 
Jesus He always is. His character is one, ‘“‘with 
whom can be no variation neither shadow that 
is cast by turning.” The dissolution of the 
physical body cannot but mean great changes 
to us, but it has not the same importance for 
God, it does not change His character or imply 
that His redemptive love manifested in Christ 
Jesus is of a timal or spatial character and sud- 
denly ceases to function when our hearts cease 
to beat. He is still and forever the God and 
Father of Jesus Christ. Nor on the other hand 
have we any reason to assume that the spirit of 
man, possessing all the functions of personality, 
including that of moral distinctions, is incapable 
of repentance once it has parted from this mortal 
clay. What is there in the merely physical 
which subtracts from personality this capability 
and leaves all the rest? 

Whether eventually there will be any finally 


112 Immortality 


impenitent is a question on which no man can 
dogmatise. The purpose of God is that all 
should turn unto Him and live, “Who willeth 
that all men should be saved and come to the 
knowledge of the truth.’ There are aspects of 
New Testament thought, especially Pauline, 
which favour universal salvation, yet 1t must be 
said that the general outlook of the New Testa- 
ment assumes that some will so persistently 
abide in evil, making evil their good, that they 
have destroyed in themselves the last hope of 
repentance. Whether Christian faith will even- 
tually accept that possibility or treat the New 
Testament assumption as a remnant of earlier 
and cruder eschatology is a question still un- 
decided. One cannot be blind to the fact that 
in the Epistles of the New Testament, especially 
the Pauline, the view of the world and of man 
is radically pessimistic. That however is not the 
impression one gathers from the attitude of 
Jesus. He who knew as no other what was in 
man, and perhaps for that reason had an inex- 
tinguishable hope for men and women, and a 
wonderfully keen sense and appreciation of the 
good that was in them. Hope for all will still 
remain with us, but the reality of free-will, and 
the analogy of the evolutionary process forbid 
our assent to dogmatic universalism. The 
divine omnipotence in relation to personality 


The Christian Idea of Immortality 113 


is not that of force but of love, and to say that 
love must conquer in the end 1s to introduce into 
it an element which is not love. If human free- 
will be a reality, it involves a self-limitation of 
God which could only compel salvation by 
unmaking man in order to save him. 

Though God be good and free be heaven, 

Not love divine can love compel; 

And though the songs of sin forgiven 

Might sound through lowest hell, 

The sweet persuasion of his voice. 

Respects the sanctity of will. 

He giveth day; thou hast thy choice 

To walk in darkness still. 

Whittier. 


If, however, there be any finally impenitent, 
any who so love evil that they persistently refuse 
the good until there be no good left in them, 
Christian thought refuses to accept the grim 
doctrine of an eternal hell. It is supposed to be 
taught in the New Testament, else it had long 
since vanished from the Christian creed. We 
hold that this supposition is not warranted, and 
that the real force of azdvzos (eternal) is inten- 
sive rather than durative, and St. Paul’s word 
an@hew (destruction) favours the idea of elim- 
ination, as personal beings, of those who are 
irretrievably impenitent.t It is not consonant 
with the revelation of God in Jesus Christ to 


t A full exegetical discussion will be found in the writer’s book, 
The Other Side of Death. 


114 Immortality 


think that when all hope of amendment is gone 
He will maintain personalities in existence for the 
solepurposeof punishment. Further, a philosophy 
of the universewhich believes in an ultimate unity 
cannot rest satisfied with a permanent dualism. 

The entrance upon the heavenly state, in so 
far as it is not a transformation at the Parousia, 
is described in the New Testament as Resurrec- 
tion. Hebrew religion had reached a faith in 
immortality before it acquired a doctrine of 
resurrection, and when it did it was profoundly 
influenced by the crude ideas of Babylonian 
Zoroastrianism and its own materialistic con- 
ception of the Messianic Kingdom. Resurrec- 
tion was the restoration of the body for the 
purpose of sharing in the glory of the Messiah’s 
reign on earth. In these beliefs the New Testa- 
ment writers were brought up, and none of them 
has quite freed himself from this materialism, 
unless it be St. John, if we treat John v, 28-29 as 
by another hand. Ecclesiastical creeds, and in 
fact the whole Church has followed the Apostolic 
writers in this adherence to Judaism. Yet the 
specifically Christian thought, particularly in 
St. Paul and St. John, has no need for a bodily 
resurrection.t The faith-union with Christ is 


t The bodily resurrection of Jesus is not in question. ‘There were 
special conditions in His case which are not present in that of His 
followers. 


The Christian Idea of Immortality 115 


itself a sharing in eternal life which knows no 
break, and when, in the dissolution of the body, 
that life passes at once to the more spiritual 
atmosphere of the Heavenly Kingdom it must 
have some means of self-expression. Paul felt 
strongly that if we must wait for that experience 
till some general resurrection the victory of 
Christ would not be complete and death would 
not be wholly gain. On the other hand he could 
by no means accept the Greek idea of a bodiless 
‘or “naked”’ spirit, a wandering and ineffective 
shade. Accordingly, he boldly conceived the 
idea of a “spiritual body” which would be ours 
immediately we had passed from the body that 
is mortal. It was a great idea, born of a great 
faith, and fulfilling the scientific principle that 
life will always form for itself an organism suited 
to its environment. We, no more than Paul, 
know what the “spiritual body”’ connotes, but 
our faith answers to his that the new life in 
Christ knows no break, that to it “God giveth 
a body as it hath pleased Him,” and we need no 
other. Our earthly body has served its purpose 
and returns to the earth whence it came. 

The Christian doctrine of immortality is 
based upon a conception of God as holy love 
seeking to raise man to a higher stage of moral 
and spiritual life, and into a closer fellowship 
with Himself. This implies also a high sense of 


116 Immortality 


human value, for such a destiny can only be 
predicated of Beings who essentially belong to 
the order of immortals. The worth of man is 
revealed in God’s effort to save him and the 
high destiny to which he calls Him. 


The Philosophy of Immortality 


GEORGE GaLLoway, D.Putu., D.D. 
Principal of St. Mary’s College, University of St. Andrews. 


It may be well to explain at the outset what is 
here meant by a Philosophy of Immortality. 
The title is not to be supposed to imply that 
speculative thought can offer a rational demon- 
stration of the truth of immortality. The phrase 
ought rather to be taken to mean the contribu- 
tion philosophy is able to make to the subject, 
whether in the way of defence or of suggestion 
and criticism. The judgment of philosophy on 
this, as on other things, is important, for its out- 
look is not departmental but synoptic. In other 
words, it deals with the experienced world as a 
whole, and is thus better fitted to determine how 
far a specific claim to be real or true coheres 
with and is justified by the body of experience. 

The idea of immortality, it need hardly be 
said, was not created by philosophical thought; 
it was presented to philosophy by religion. Very 


117 


118 Immortality 


early in human culture there emerged beliefs in 
the soul’s survival after death, beliefs which 
persisted; and faith in immortality has become 
a central doctrine of some of the greatest 
religions. The belief that man’s destiny lies 
beyond this present earthly environment has 
been deep-rooted and widespread, and _ this 
aspiration, some have thought, is a token that 
it will find a fulfilment. If man were a mere 
“thriving earth worm,” why should he be 
moved by these far-reaching hopes? Yet it 
would not be wise to lay too much stress on this 
argument. The passion for immortality is not 
universal in races or in individuals, and there 
are those who welcome a lapse into the un- 
conscious as the price of deliverance from the 
limits of finitude and the bondage of desire. An 
eminent thinker of our day says about the 
longing for a future life: “It is idle to repeat, ‘I 
want something,’ unless you can show that the 
nature of things demands it also.”” And because 
metaphysics deals with the nature of things, or 
reality, men look to it for some ruling on the 
subject. From the speculative point of view 
the question frames itself in this way: Is reality 
such that immortality is necessary? Does the 
nature of things call for the continued existence 
of persons after death? Or is reality of such a 
character that the persistence of any form of 


The Philosophy of Immortality 119 


personal life after the dissolution of the body is 
contradictory, and therefore impossible? Before 
considering how far philosophy can answer these 
questions we ought to be clear about two points: 
we must understand definitely what is meant by 
(a) the soul, and (6) immortality. 

(a) In popular thought about the soul there 
still linger some of the associations of early 
culture. Originally connected with the breath 
as the principle of life, the soul for primitive folk 
was a kind of shadowy entity within the body, 
but capable of being detached from it and of 
returning to it again. Hence crude notions of 
the transmigration of souls were possible, the 
idea, for instance, that the soul of man after 
death might pass into an animal. The vestiges 
of this animism persisted long; and it was the 
merit of Socrates, if we accept Prof. Burnet’s 
view, that he discarded this way of thinking and 
frankly identified the soul with the self. Ob- 
viously no survival of the soul which did not 
mean the survival of the self, could have any 
personal and ethical value. We do not, then, 
when we speak of the soul, mean an entity or 
substratum apart from the self, and to which the 
self is somehow attached. This crude way of 
thinking is really a survival of animism. 

(6) The term “immortality”? would, prima 
facie, seem to convey a meaning sufficiently 


120 Immortality 


precise, for it indicates that the soul is not 
dissolved by death. Yet the notion of death- 
lessness or eternity may be variously conceived. 
It may denote the fulness of a life superior to 
change and decay and realised even now, a life 
in comparison with which death does not count. 
The words of Schleiermacher in the Reden sug- 
gest this kind of immortality: “‘In the midst of 
finitude to be one with the Infinite, and in every 
moment to be eternal, is the immortality of 
religion.” Yet neither immortality in this sense, 
nor the eternity of an impersonal reason in 
which men share, is the religious doctrine of 
immortality. Nor is the spiritual idea of eternal 
life to be identified with mere indefinite duration 
in time. As Von Hiigel remarks: “‘The soul qua 
religious has no interest in just simple unending 
existence, of no matter what kind or of a merely 
natural kind.”’ The unending senility of Swift’s 
Struldbrugs, or the monotonous endurance of 
Tennyson’s Tithonus, would be an object of 
dread, not of desire. When we speak of personal 
immortality we emphasise the quality rather 
than the quantity of the life, and we mean that 
the personal values are conserved and main- 
tained. 

Further, I think most people will agree that 
persistence without any continuity of memory 
and interest would be futile; for a personality 


The Philosophy of Immortality 121 


which had no living links of connection with 
what had gone before would be, to all purposes, 
another personality. A contemporary philo- 
sopher, Dr. McTaggart, has tried to defend an 
immortality without memory, but his arguments 
are unconvincing. No one, remarked Aristotle, 
would wish to possess all good on condition of 
becoming another person,' and Leibniz asked, 
“What good would it do you to become king of 
China on condition that you forgot what you 
had been?” In fact, if immortality means per- 
sonal immortality, then some community of 
memory and interest must survive the break 
caused by death. In other words, death must 
not mean a total rupture of continuity; it must 
somehow be bridged by memory as in the ana- 
logous case of dreamless sleep. However great 
the change implied by death, the self must 
preserve the consciousness of its identity 
throughout. 

After these explanations let us now turn to 
consider briefly the treatment of the subject in 
certain systems of philosophy. In this way we 
shall come to understand better the difficulties 
raised by the problem, and perhaps we may be 
able to see better the most promising line by 
which a solution may be approached. 

In ancient philosophy the most important con- 

t Eth. Nic., ix, 4, 1166a. 


122 Immortality 


tribution to the subject was made by Plato. As 
we follow the different “‘proofs’’ he offers, we 
feel we are in contact with a mind already pro- 
foundly convinced of immortality as a fact. The 
universe revealed a moral order, and Plato 
believed that immortality was implied in the 
working of that order. The various arguments 
he develops in its favour represent endeavours 
to find a support for his independent conviction 
even though as arguments they frequently fail 
to impress us. There is sometimes difficulty in 
accepting the presupposition of some of his 
““proofs.’” When he tells us that the soul, being 
simple, cannot be dissolved into constituent 
elements, we ask how we can be assured of its 
simplicity. In the same dialogue, the Phedo, 
he applies his principle that things have certain 
predicates because they share in certain ideas to 
_ show that the soul, because it partakes of the 
idea of life, cannot be mortal. Yet this only 
shows that the soul, so long as it continues to be 
a soul, must be living. It does not prove that a 
soul cannot die. In the Republic he contends 
that a thing can only be destroyed by its oppo- 
site, as snow by heat; and he concludes that if 
vice, the disease of the soul, could destroy it, the 
soul would have already been destroyed. Some 
of the arguments set forth in the Phadrus, the 
Timeus and the Laws will appeal rather more 


The Philosophy of Immortality 123 


to the modern mind. The “proof” in the 
Phedrus turns on the principle that the soul is 
self-moved, and is also a source of movement in 
other beings.* Or, as we might put it, the soul 
reveals a principle of spontaneity and activity 
which lifts it above the sphere of mechanism, 
and seems to suggest its independence. In the 
Timeus Plato throws out another suggestion. 
Our souls, he tells us, at least in their higher 
part, are the work of the Creator, and He cannot 
will to destroy His own creation.2. Here the 
stress of the argument falls on the character of 
God whose will is “a greater and mightier bond”’ 
than can be disrupted by the forces of dissolu- 
tion; and the idea is one which has still a strong 
appeal. In the Laws, the work of his old age, 
Plato reiterates his former notion that the soul 
is self-moved; it is prior to the body and rules 
it, the “‘oldest of all things born,” and it is 
immortal.; Taken singly, none of Plato’s 
*“‘proofs”’ can be called convincing, but taken 
together they yield an impressive testimony to 
the faith of one of the greatest of minds that the 
destiny of the human spirit lies in a transcend- 
ent world. 

Aristotle did not follow the lead of his teacher 


t Phedrus, 245 e. 246a, where the soul is described as Té aird 
Kiwvodv, and Tots &d\Aos boa Kivetrar wnyh Kal dpxh Kivhoews. 


2 Timeus, 41 A.B. 3 Laws, 892, 896, 907. 


124 Immortality 


in this matter. The soul, as he conceives it, is the 
actualisation, the ideal fulfilment (évteAéyea) 
of the body, and so, one would suppose, not 
independent of the body. And though the 
human spirit shares in the “creative reason”’ 
which is eternal, yet this incorporeal reason is 
devoid of the qualities of memory and intelligent 
thinking. 

At the birth of modern philosophy men were 
feeling the need of some closer determination of 
the soul in its relation to the world, and the term 
substance, the Latinised form of the Greek odcta, 
was used to define it. Descartes distinguishes 
and contrasts the soul as unextended and think- 
ing substance from extended and material sub- 
stances in nature, and between the two kinds 
of substance there is nothing in common. Yet 
in both cases the term substance denoted some- 
thing which exists in its own right, and func- 
tions as the support or substratum of qualities; 
and this conception when applied to the mind 
or soul tended to convey misleading associations. 
None the less the word had come to stay, and 
Locke, in the Essay, uses the same category of 
substance and attribute alike in regard to matter 
and to mind. In the early pages of the Analogy 
we find Butler adopting the idea that the soul 
is a simple, unitary and indiscerptible being in 
which consciousness inheres, and so arguing to 


The Philosophy of Immortality 125 


its independence and immortality. All this is 
quite in harmony with Locke’s use of substance. 
This way of thinking persisted until the time of 
Kant; nor is it difficult to discern the motive 
which inspired it. People thought there must be 
some permanent basis or point to which the 
changing life of the soul could be attached, and 
by which it might be sustained. It was just 
against this conception of substance that Kant 
directed the fire of his criticism. 

The burden of Kant’s objection to the so- 
called Rational Psychology is that it speaks 
of the soul as a substance, one and simple, and 
in doing so misapplies the term. Substance is 
a category by which the mind synthesises the 
data of sense-perception, and as such it is not to 
be applied to the synthesising mind itself. If 
you suppose there is an inner perception of the 
mind as a unity or substance behind its changing 
states, you are mistaken, for by this inner per- 
ception you reach nothing permanent. No 
doubt, says Kant, the “‘I think”’ of apperception 
accompanies all our perceptions, but it is merely 
a logical subject, and it is illegitimate to turn 
this logical subject into a metaphysical reality 
and to describe it as a unitary thinking sub- 
stance. 

Kant’s penetrating criticism finally exposed 
‘some of the fallacies of the old psychology, and 


126 Immortality 


showed that arguments for immortality based 
on them were no longer valid. He made it plain 
that one could not uncritically use categories 
valid in the external world of the inner world or 
mind. At the same time his own conception 
of the self was highly ambiguous and unsatis- 
factory, and in effect reduced it to a nebulous 
logical abstraction. If the self is not in some 
sense real, how, we ask, can its experience be 
valid? and why should we be able to distinguish 
between the phenomenal and the real? In fact 
Kant had to rehabilitate the self when he came 
to deal with the practical reason or moral will. 

I go on to examine two broad lines of approach 
by which modern metaphysical thinkers have 
sought to determine the nature and destiny of 
the soul. The one line is to decide its nature 
and claims in the light of the great whole of 
things within which it appears: the other line 
is to consider the character of individuality 
itself, and on this basis to infer the nature and 
prospects of the individual self. 

The former method was followed by Spinoza. 
Like Descartes, Spinoza defined substance as 
that which exists and is conceived per se, and 
from this he inferred that there could be only 
one substance, the universe, Deus sive natura. 
This one substance, manifesting itself for us 
under the attributes of extension and thought, 


The Philosophy of Immortality 127 


embraces all things and minds as phases or 
modes of its own being. The conditions im- 
posed by this substance preclude any independ- 
ent reality on the part of individuals. The 
mind of man is just the idea of the human body, 
and has only a seeming reality as the idea of 
this particular body. Accordingly, though 
Spinoza speaks of the pars eterna nostri and says, 
sentumus experumurque nos eternos esse, he must 
mean that mind in man merely persists as an 
aspect of the infinite Mind; and this Mind is 
utterly different from the limited mind of man. 
For Spinoza the claims of the one Substance are 
paramount, and annihilate all finite claims. 

In this matter something the same must be 
said of the system of Hegel. No doubt Hegel 
will have nothing to do with the notion that 
substance is the ultimate category; he remarks 
tersely that the Absolute is subject, not sub- 
stance. The Absolute is the all-inclusive self- 
consciousness which expresses itself in and 
through finite minds. But as these minds are 
only differentiated from the Absolute Mind and 
from one another by their specific relation to 
particular human bodies, it would seem inevit- 
able that, when the body is dissolved, the soul 
must be absorbed and merged in the Absolute. 
No doubt Hegel does not explicitly deny im- 
mortality, and he speaks of the eternity of the 


128 Immortality 


spirit; but it is not easy to see that his concep- 
tion of the universe gives any real ground for 
the expectation that the soul after death should 
survive as a separate centre of consciousness 
within the Absolute. The negative conclusion 
is more explicitly drawn by the late Dr. Bosan- 
quet in his Gifford Lectures on The Value and 
Destiny of the Individual. For him the claims 
of the Absolute are supreme, and the contra- 
dictions which infect the notion of the finite 
mind make it impossible to treat it as independ- 
ently real. In truth the self has no proper being 
for itself; 1t is not substantial but adjectival, a 
qualification of the Absolute, which is the per- 
fect and all-inclusive Individual. ‘“‘The self, 
beyond escape, is an element in the Absolute,” 
and so “our best is really the being of the Abso- 
lute Reality.’? * Another believer in Absolutism, 
the late Professor Royce, made a brave attempt 
to find a place for immortality in his system. 
He lays great stress on the uniqueness of the 
individual as a whole of meaning, and suggests 
that these individual meanings are the essence 
of the mode in which the Absolute defines or 
specifies itself. It is true we can think of these 
meanings as involved in the self-representative 
system of the Infinite, but after all a living soul 
is more than a meaning. And if the Absolute is 
t Op. cit. pp. 258, 288. 


The Philosophy of Immortality 129 


a self and all-inclusive, as Royce supposes, it is 
impossible to see how a system of selves can fall 
within one Self and still retain their individual- 
ity. 

I think our conclusion must be that Abso- 
lutism, if it is thorough and consistent, leaves no 
room for the immortality of the self. The reason 
is that the demands of the universal force upon 
it a conception of the self which does not favour 
such a conclusion. Of course, an Absolutist 
philosophy leaves various characteristics of the 
finite self unexplained. To me it does not seem 
evident why, in such a system, even the illusion 
of individuality should arise. Nor is it apparent 
why our sense of spontaneity, freedom, and 
responsibility should be so deep-rooted. These 
facts are hard to reconcile with the theory 
that individuals have no real being for them- 
selves. 

Let us now turn to the other line of approach, 
that which sets out from the character and claims 
of individuality. This was the path which 
Leibniz followed, and, as we shall see, it yields a 
more promising basis for the discussion of im- 
mortality. Leibniz used the term substance to 
define the soul, but for him substance in this 
connection was not a category of the external 
world: he meant by it an active spiritual being 
that unified its own states. It is important to 


130 Immortality 


remember that the external associations of sub- 
stance are not to be carried over into the concep- 
tion of the soul. If the soul is regarded as a 
kind of substratum which supports the psychical 
life, difficulties at once arise. For how can 
thoughts inhere in a substratum which is other 
than the thoughts themselves? On the other 
hand, if individuality is not real, if the soul or 
self has not in some sense a being of its own, 
then there seems no good reason to expect its 
persistence. 

Look at the matter in this way. Suppose we 
discard the notion of substance in any form, 
how, in that case, are we to regard the psychical 
life? If we say the self is merely the stream of 
consciousness, the fleeting succession of mental 
states, then the unity of the whole becomes un- 
intelligible. An atomistic psychology, which : 
seeks to build up the unity by the association of 
elements, really presupposes that which it 
strives to explain. For any act of connecting 
presupposes the unity of that which connects. 
It will be contended, no doubt, that the self is 
just the systematic unity of our ideas and desires, 
and if you say it is more than this you are 
hypostatismg an abstraction. Now it is true 
that if we make the self the object of reflexion, 
and suppose it forms the ground of psychical 
process, a ground which is other than conscious- 


The Philosophy of Immortality 131 


ness and on which consciousness depends, then 
our position is open to criticism.t But we may 
refrain from asserting this, and at the same time 
insist that the unity and system of the inner life 
require explanation; and the explanation, we 
believe, is not to be found in the psychical 
elements themselves. Soul-life must be a unity 
from the first, and the process of development 
from the relatively simple to the complex and 
highly articulated is only possible within this 
unity. The self, we may be told, expands with 
its experiences, and is in some sense constituted 
by them. This is true of the self as object of 
thought, the self as ideal construction. But 
deeper than the self as object, and the condition 
of the development of the generalised idea of 
self, is the self as ego, immediately experienced 
and active in the process of synthesis and devel- 
opment. On this basal self depends the unity of 
psychical experience; and the activity of the ego 
is presupposed in memory and association, as 
well as in the correlation and fusion of the 
stimuli from the different sensory centres. It 
is futile to argue that these characteristics have 
gradually emerged in the course of psychical 
evolution; the truth is that there would have 
been no evolution if the self, m rudimentary 


t This is what McDougall, in his Body and Mind, tends to do. 
Vide p. 283. 


132 Immortality 


form, had not been present in the process from 
the first, and had not functioned throughout as 
a principle of synthesis. That the self requires 
some soul-substance to sustain it is of course an 
error, for the self itself is real and maintains 
itself in its changing states. In this connection 
Lotze has justly remarked: “We do not believe 
in the unity of the soul because it appears as a 
unity, but because it is able to appear or mani- 
fest itself in some way.” ! In other words, the 
unity is already presupposed in the facts, and 
is not evolved from them. 

Some of the criticisms directed against the 
reality of the soul or active self are due to a 
failure to distinguish between the self as object 
of conceptual thinking and the fundamental self 
given in immediate experience.? In distinction 
from the pure ego, as Professor Ward says, the 
conceptual self is an “objective construction or 
intellective system.’ And it is true that for 
generalised thinking the idividuality and 
uniqueness of the self are elusive, perhaps even 
contradictory. Yet these dialectical difficulties 
will not disconcert us, if we bear in mind that 
our intellectual constructions of the self are 


t Metaphysics, Eng. Trans., II, 176. 

2 For a very important discussion of the nature and development 
of this distinction the reader is referred to Ward’s Psychological 
Principles, pp. 361-82. 


The Philosophy of Immortality 133 


only possible because a real ego forms the basis 
for any intellectual construction whatever. 

A final word may be added about the applica- 
tion of the term substance to the soul. The point 
is that, if we use the word, we use it with no 
implication of a substratum such as commonly 
clings to the external category. Writers like 
Paulsen and Wundt suppose that if we do employ 
the word we are illegitimately transferring a 
category associated with outer experience to the 
mind. But this seems to be a mistake, and the 
reverse is true. In other words, it is our direct 
experience of the enduring centre and the unify- 
ing principle of psychical process which we 
transfer to outer things, and so allow ourselves 
to speak of substance as the “support” of 
qualities. 

So far we have tried to vindicate the reality 
and primacy of the self as the active and unifying 
principle of human experience. For it is plain 
that, if this cannot be done, any ground of belief 
in the survival of the self is zpso facto precluded. 
Still even those who accept the argument so far 
may feel that it does not carry with it any 
necessary implication of immortality. Granted, 
they will say, that the soul is not explained by 
the body, nevertheless souls are always found in 
conjunction with bodies, and it seems possible 
that there is such a correlation between body and 


134 Immortality 


soul that the one cannot exist without the other. 
The two factors appear to be so intimately relat- 
ed that the elimination of the one may inevitably 
involve the extinction of the other. This, I 
think, would be true if the relation of mind to 
body were that which is described as epiphenom- 
enalism or as parallelism. But if we take these 
theories as ultimate metaphysical truths, they 
break down before the activity and spontaneity 
of the self as a fact of experience. On the other 
hand, if we accept the interaction of soul and 
body, this might seem hostile to belief in the 
independence of the soul. 

About the correlation of neural and psychic 
process, and about the mfluence of the one on 
the other, there seems no valid reason for doubt. 
If the visual centres in the occipital lobe of the 
braim are seriously damaged blindness ensues, 
and the action of alcohol or drugs on the cerebral 
centres is followed by a marked disturbance of 
the thinking powers. These and many other 
facts are too familiar to need emphasis; nor will 
it be disputed that there is a broad correspond- 
ence between the complexity of brain structure 
and mental faculty. But it is just as necessary 
to insist that the mind is capable of affecting 
bodily processes. Changes in the circulatory 
and the nervous system ensue from psychic 
influences, and the same is true of secretion and 


The Philosophy of Immortality 135 


digestion. Under hypnosis a person can be made 
insensible to pain, and we know that the will of 
a patient may greatly affect his chances of 
recovery from illness. When all is said, how- 
ever, the phenomena of interaction do not yield 
any positive proof that the soul could not exist 
apart from the earthly body, and especially so 
when we bear in mind that the self which thinks 
can never be explained as a function of physiolog- 
ical processes. The truth rather is that the 
soul-life, in its progressive development, reveals 
an increasing independence of physical condi- 
tions. A powerful mind can often overcome the 
obstacles imposed by a feeble body. In the case 
of an individual who bends his will to the acquire- 
ment of certain aptitudes, it has been pointed 
out that “changes in different localities of the 
nervous mechanism, and in the association- 
tracts connecting these localities, gradually ensue 
as a consequence.” And we may generalise and 
say that, far from function being absolutely 
determined by structure, it would be more 
correct to affirm that, as development proceeds, 
structure is more and more determined by func- 
tion. To put the point more specifically, the 
thinking power of man was not determined once 
and for all by a given complex brain-structure; 
but just as man developed as a thinking animal, 
the complex cerebral system was gradually arti- 


136 Immortality 


culated in response to the function. This lends 
support to our belief in the primacy and forma- 
tive power of the psychical life in the process of 
human development. And the formative func- 
tion of the soul at least suggests, though it does 
not prove, that its existence may not cease with 
the dissolution of the particular organism 
through which it acts. 

The case for immortality would be established 
if it could be shown that the human self is in- 
trinsically eternal. A well-known thinker, Dr. 
McTaggart, has argued that finite selves are 
differentiations of an impersonal Absolute, and 
so can neither come into being nor pass away. 
But he does not prove the Absolute must be 
differentiated thus, nor, if it were so, that these 
differentiations are necessarily identical with 
human selves. Moreover, the theory involves 
all the improbabilities of personal pre-existence. 
The truth seems to be that there is no way of 
demonstrating that a personal self which has 
come into being is somehow immortal in its own 
right. 

But if metaphysics cannot yield positive proof 
of immortality, it may at least indicate possibili- 
ties or even suggest probabilities; and especially 
so in view of the reality of the self, its formative 
function, and its relative independence. 

The definite question which arises at this point 


The Philosophy of Immortality 137 


is, whether we can give grounds for believing it 
to be possible or likely that, when the particular 
complex we call the body is dissolved, the soul 
continues and, it may be, enters on a new and 
higher form of experience. The philosophical 
theory which, I think, lends most support to 
this conclusion is monadism. On this view the 
body is a system of individual beings, which are 
psychical centres possessing varying degrees of 
psychical life, all of them being correlated to a 
supreme or “dominant monad”’ called the soul. 
The soul, so conceived, is not created by the 
interaction of the individual centres with which 
it is in sympathetic rapport: it has a being of its 
own, and may, as Leibniz suggested, have pre- 
existed, though not in a personal form. The 
quickening of a pre-existing monad into a soul 
or developed self could only be explained by 
the immanent activity of the Divine Spirit that 
sustains and is present to all centres of experi- 
ence. On the other hand, one has still to ask 
whether the soul, after the break caused by 
death, could retain such a continuity with its 
own past and its former environment as would 
form a basis for memory. For survival without 
memory would, we have concluded, not be 
personal survival. It would be fatal to our 
hypothesis if it could be shown that memory 
entirely depends on brain structure and cerebral 


138 Immortality 


traces. For even though the latter were ulti- 
mately interpreted by a theory of monads, yet 
at death the monads cease to form the specific 
interacting system through which the soul works. 

Now, on any showing, the complex of elements 
which form the brain could not create memory 
apart from the persisting self which remembers. 
And _ psychological analysis shows that the 
operation of memory cannot be understood 
apart from the mediation of psychical “‘dis- 
positions”’ which intervene between the cerebral 
structure and the soul, though they stand in 
closer relation to the latter than to the former.* 
The need for this supposition will be clear if you 
reflect that memory depends largely on mean- 
ings, and meanings are not cerebral processes. 
If the soul then after death carries with it those 
psychical dispositions, these may form a suf- 
ficient ground for such memory as is needed to 
link .the new stage of soul-life with what has 
gone before, and so to enable the self to recognise 
itself as one in the different stages of its develop- 
ment. It will be pointed out that the soul and 
its dispositions have been developed in relation 
to a specific body and a determinate environ- 


On this point vide McDougall’s Body and Mind, p. 342 ff: 
It is important to realise that meaning cannot be expressed by 
brain structure. It involves psychical process, and memory implies 
meaning. 


The Philosophy of Immortality 139 


ment, and if both body and environment pass 
away it is difficult to see how the disembodied 
self could recognise itself as continuous with a 
previous state of existence. In reply we admit 
that death must mean a far-reaching change, 
but how great the change is we do not know. It 
is at least possible that the soul when liberated 
from the body may form for itself a new or 
transfigured body which has links of connection 
with the former organism and its corresponding 
environment. In that case the needful degree 
of continuity between the different stages of the 
soul’s existence might be conserved. To some 
this line of thought may appear quite uncon- 
vineing, but at least we have no warrant for 
concluding that there can be no other embodi- 
ment of the spirit than the present. A recent 
thinker who would not have accepted the fore- 
going hypothesis was still constrained to admit 
that it is “impossible to deny that there may be 
future gradations of experience continuous with 
our finite selves.” * 

The course of this discussion confirms us in 
the belief that metaphysics gives no cogent proof 
of immortality, though it can show the weakness 
of arguments against it and indicate possibilities 
in its favour. But philosophy is wider than meta- 
physics in the strict sense; it takes cognisance of 

* Bosanquet, The Value and Destiny of the Individual, p. 288. 


140 Immortality 


all aspects of experience, and experience includes 
the realm of values. It is just the ethical and 
spiritual values of life which raise immortality 
from a merely possible truth to an object of 
reasonable faith. The ethical and_ spiritual 
grounds for immortality do not fall within the 
scope of this paper, but it seems well to indicate 
how the purely speculative treatment of the 
subject is supplemented from the standpoint 
of judgments-of-value. 

Mere facts, if such there be, do not constitute 
what is most important in our many-coloured 
human life. What constantly interests us is the 
relation of facts to our feelings and purposes, 
and out of this relation man develops the values 
which are the object of his desire and hope, and 
therefore of his faith. And it is above all the 
ethical and spiritual values which are the highest 
as well as the deepest things in the life of man- 
kind. Now valuation is rooted in the affective 
and volitional life, and is thus in its essence 
personal; to speak of purely impersonal values 
amounts to a contradiction in terms. Persons, in 
other words, are the active centres and sustainers 
of values, and, taken strictly, there can be no 
conservation of values in the universe apart 
from the conservation of: persons. Above all it 
is the value of moral and spiritual personality 
which gives urgency to the demand that it should 


The Philosophy of Immortality 141 


be conserved. Hence the poet’s protest against 
the thought that man 


**Who loved, who suffered countless ills, 
Who battled for the True, the Just,”’ 


shall in the end 


**Be blown about the desert dust 
Or sealed within the iron hills.”’ 


If it be said that there is an immanent justice in 
the world which satisfies our sense of values, if 
it be argued that here and now we attain a com- 
pleteness of life that renders any further stage 
of existence unnecessary, then in neither case, 
we reply, is there warrant for the assertion. 
That we find all the justice we need on earth 
when those who least deserve to suffer often 
suffer most, and the guilty frequently bring the 
worst consequences of their misdeeds on the in- 
nocent, cannot be maintained. Nor is it true 
that man attains completeness in this life. He is 
ever seeking, but is doomed never to find all 
he seeks; and the upward striving spirit is often 
cut off ere his powers can ripen to fruition. 
Man’s reach seems greater than his grasp, and 
the demand for a complete good is expressed in 
the thought that immortality is a postulate of the 
moral and spiritual life. By a moral: postu- 


142 Immortality 


late we mean an idea which gives coherence to 
man’s life and makes the universe in which he 
lives morally a more reasonable one. So under- 
stood a postulate is something more and deeper 
than a subjective desire. 

Finally we ask: Is there any assurance that 
the world of facts must cohere with the claims of 
the ethical values, and that what ought to be 
really is? So far as the speculative theory of 
reality is concerned, we found it did not con- 
tradict a belief in the survival of the self, though 
it could offer no demonstration. Any further 
suggestions 1t could make were of the nature of 
hypotheses. There is nothing, therefore, in the 
structure of reality, so far as we know it, to 
neutralise what we may call the argument from 
value. Further assurance can only flow from 
our faith that the world of existences and the 
world of values form a teleological order in 
which the lower is a means to the higher. In the 
end our confidence that this is so rests on our 
faith that we live in a moral cosmos, the final 
ground of which is a supreme moral and spiritual 
Being. That the realms of nature and spirit are 
not alien to one another is clear enough, but our 
conviction that the universe will respond to 
and implement the full demands of the spiritual 
life can only rest on our faith in the character of 
God Himself. If we restrict ourselves to what 


The Philosophy of Immortality 143 


science and metaphysics can tell us, the problem 
of a life after death is likely to end in a note of 
uncertainty: 


“Tt may be that the gulfs will wash us down: 
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles.” 


A hope more sure and steadfast comes to us from 
our perception of the significance of spiritual per- 
sonality, and from our faith m the goodness of 
God who will conserve what deserves to be 
conserved. For God, as Plato felt, cannot will 
to destroy His own highest handiwork. 


The Ethical Basis of Immortality 


Rupoutr Evcxen, D.D., Ph.D. 


In modern times the problem of immortality 
has undergone many changes in the thoughts 
of men. In former ages immortality was re- 
garded as absolutely certain; it brought a definite 
end to suffering and sure comfort in face of the 
dangers and distresses of life. Now, however, 
doubt has gained ground, and we dare not evade 
the task of substantiating what formerly was 
self-evident. In these circumstances it is parti- 
cularly important to establish an ethical basis for 
immortality. This, however, cannot be success- 
fully done without discussing the meaning of 
man’s ethical struggle in general. We shall 
therefore follow this movement to that point 
where the ethical principle of immortality clearly 
emerges and gives a peculiar direction to our 
whole life. We shall see that the life of our soul 
contains different stages and that in these the 
relationships to time and eternity are differently 
regarded. We find man as a creature of nature 
144 


The Ethical Basis of Immortality 145 


under the dominion of time; we find him as a 
spiritual being in conflict with time; we find him 
ultimately as a participant of immortality exalted 
above all time. 

Let us follow more closely the steps by which 
the thought of immortality constantly leads us 
on. 


I 


Man as a creature of nature under the power of Time 


The conception of nature has considerably 
changed. According to the view formerly held, 
the material world appeared as a closed and 
limited circle, as a cosmos formed like a work of 
art. Every single part was determined by its 
position in the whole. The movements in space 
had also a fixed order, and they seemed directed 
to a guiding goal. The modern view of nature 
has given to movement and with it to time more 
and more significance and has laid ever less stress 
upon the idea of the permanent. Of course, the 
modern view recognises unchangeable elements, 
but regards single units as in continuous change 
and looks upon movement in space and time as 
the ground phenomenon of the material world. 
The stage of organic: life brings relationships 
which possess a certain measure of duration and 
bind the manifold into unity; but this duration is 


146 Immortality 


limited, for all organic life is subject to death. 
Single lives must pass away and leave their places 
to others. All is a constant coming and going. 
The succession of generations effects a constant 
renewal of life and individuals appear in view of 
the life-process as negligible quantities, except as 
mere means for the purpose of upholding this 
process. We do not see that through the ebb 
and flow something essentially new is won and 
that the restless movement serves a higher end. 

As a creature of nature man shares this 
apparently senseless life-process. He experiences 
the changing phases of youth, prime and old age. 
Only with him these distinctions are more 
sharply defined than in the case of animals. 
Sooner or later his life must end in death. 
Consequent on his intellectual endowment the 
thought of death constantly occupies his mind, 
alarms him, and drives him in some fashion to 
meet the annihilation that threatens. We know 
how this reaction has taken different forms and 
how in it faith and fantasy have both co-operated, 
without, however, on the plane of sense leading 
to a satisfying result. 

The power of time extends over all the fori 
and kinds of the life of individuals. The older 
view, e.g. the Greek, regarded these forms as 
unchangeable, and looked upon this unchange- 
ableness as evidence of an eternal order and a 


The Ethical Basis of Immortality 147 


complete superiority of the form over the mate- 
rial. Modern natural science has by palpable 
proofs shown the variability of forms. Geology 
and paleontology show incontrovertibly that 
whole species of life die out. At the same time 
the Evolution theory wins, far beyond the con- 
testable assertions of Darwin, ever more ground, 
and the recognition of the emergence of new 
kinds of life pushes back more and more the 
boundary between the changeable and the per- 
manent. We must indeed acknowledge the 
capacity of nature to create forms liable indeed 
to change but superior to mere mechanism. 
Nature seems to produce ever new formations. 

As soon as we consider long periods of time we 
note that the human race in its material aspect 
shares this variability. It appears to have 
developed gradually and with difficulty from 
crude beginnings. Of course, that fact does not 
wipe out the distinction between men and 
animals, as materialism affirms, but it shows that 
man is also subject to the effects of time and is 
more strongly affected thereby than the older 
thinking assumed. The sway of becoming is 
also here not to be combated. For immortality 
on this ground, however, there is no room. We 
must pass over the boundaries of nature in order 
even to touch this problem. Life here is like an 
unlimited stream whose beginning and end we 


148 Immortality 


are not able to see. Time encompasses us entire- 
ly as transient creatures of sense. 


Il 
Man as a spiritual being in conflict with Time 


We must first clearly differentiate the spiritual 
from the psychic in nature. The animals also 
share a psychic life in many manifestations, but 
theirs lacks self-sufficiency and brings no new 
aims. It is a piece of the nature process and all 
its striving only serves the material preservation 
of life and its reproduction. It is first of all in 
the human realm that there appears what we call 
the: spiritual element, which transcends nature 
and opens up new paths and purposes. This 
life arises at first in tentative beginnings, but it 
grows incessantly, and manifests itself ever more 
distinctly as a new stage of reality. It opposes 
to nature a new order of life and thereby wins a 
cosmic meaning, which cannot possibly limit 
itself to our little earth. Here life does not 
exhaust itself in the relationship of its single parts 
to their environment, or to one another, but 1t 
forms an inner life, ultimately indeed an inner 
world with its own orders and values. The 
particular units are now held together by a unity. 
By his thinking man is able to break the bond 
of his material environment and by his own 


The Ethical Basis of Immortality 149 


activity to form an atmosphere, yes, to create a 
new realm. The whole course of human history 
shows a continual advance from the material to 
the immaterial world, a momentous msurgence 
of the material into the immaterial. More and 
more the struggle develops into ideal magnitudes 
and the upward movement becomes a conflict 
carried on by these. What formerly seemed the 
whole is now reduced to a mere environment. 
How the advance of life turns the material into 
means and tools for the use of the intellectual 
is plainly shown by the development of language. 
Its palpable tokens are more and more trans- 
formed into symbols of the mind. Similarly 
it happens in religion and in law. The world of 
knowledge differentiates itself ever more from 
that of naive man, and leaves us in two life- 
worlds; one of material sensation and that of 
self-active thought. In all these provinces re- 
markable progress has been made, particularly 
in modern times. More than ever before man 
has found his chief impulse and power in ideas 
and principles. A thorough spiritualisation is un- 
deniable. What, however, calls for special con- 
sideration is connected with that new condition 
of life which we call Kultur, or civilisation. Here 
man does not accept the state of life into which 
he is born as an imposed fate, but criticises it 
and seeks to his best ability to elevate it. More 


150 Immortality 


and more life develops from the material world 
into that of thought, ever more intellectual 
contents are produced, and there arises a realm 
that is self-dependent, and life is changed into a 
self-development. This advance to a self-de- 
pendent life produces a peculiar relation of the 
temporal to the supra-temporal. The unfolding 
of that life is always dependent upon time; 
only with its help and through its experiences 
and services can the development reach its height 
and break the manifold obstacles. But such 
advance within time requires simultaneously 
an elevation above time. Man is by no means 
a mere piece of temporal becoming. He puts 
single units together; he surveys time, he 
examines and tests its character, he strives to 
win for it a permanent content, and thus dares 
to wage a fight against the mere flight of time. 
There arises a new relation of thinking man to 
things. On the plane of nature things are in 
contact only externally: an inner assimilation 
isnot reached. Now, however, life on the spirit- 
ual level experiences a thorough-going clari- 
fication through an important differentiation. 
It is indeed a peculiarity of thought that it can 
distinguish the object from the subjective condi- 
tion and keep both separate. The object, while 
distinct, remains in the presence of the soul, 
which cannot help occupying itself with the 


The Ethical Basis of Immortality 151 


object, and as it were draws the same back to 
itself. There thus arises a concurrent inter- 
action of subject and object. Life is essentially 
enlarged and encloses itself in an independent 
circle. There grow up enduring spiritual crea- 
tions which separating themselves from human 
conditions, demand rights of their own and 
exercise considerable power. Ultimately there 
arises a realm of independent truth. Therewith 
a bright light is shed upon life, and for its struggle 
a firm hold is secured. The apprehension of 
objective truth, however, raises man above the 
temporal. Although he cannot do without time 
in order to furnish his life with a content, 
the character of this content is not affected by 
the flight of time, and as it unfolds man may 
feel himself superior to time altogether. Then 
there rises up a strong desire that life and its 
work should endure. In virtue of our spiritual 
character we resist the limitation of our life to 
the short span which fate has assigned us. The 
individual, a transitory being who must soon de- 
part from life’s arena, is forcibly impelled to 
leave behind some kind of enduring trace of his 
existence, if only to live a little longer in the 
memory of his human environment. ' Hence 
celebrated kings have erected proud memorials 
of their deeds and inscribed their names on the 
inaccessible cliffs. Behind such action lies not 


152 Immortality 


merely man’s vain thirst for fame, but his 
endeavour not to let his whole being and in- 
fluence sink into absolute nothingness. It is the 
appearance on life’s horizon of the longing for 
immortality, for liberation from the thraldom of 
time, which threatens to swallow us up. 

Civilisation demands _ inter-relations that 
transcend the individual units. By the tendrils 
of tradition the spiritual life rises to its heights. 
The present must take firm hold of the past in 
order to build itself up. Man would like to 
withdraw the main trunk of the tree of life from 
all change and so secure permanence to the 
results of his striving. ‘This fact invests the idea 
of the classical with its great influence. Arrange- 
ments and customs of life proclaimed unchange- 
able and honoured as inviolable dominate men, 
particularly in the initial stages of civilisation. 
Religion likewise by its association of life with a 
sacred order works for permanence. All change 
is here forbidden as wanton wickedness. 

Plato in particular has depicted in glowing 
colours the universal desire for immortality in 
the well-known passage about the banquet. He 
shows that nature, not yet at the human level, 
already manifests a vague instinctive desire for 
immortality in the propagative impulse, which 
implies the desire of creatures to live on in their 
offspring after their own dissolution. The striv- 


The Ethical Basis of Immortality 153 


ing of heroes for fame is an expression of the will 
to be immortal. The works of poets and states- 
men also reach out to immortality. The same 
end is seen in the working out of the eternal in 
the reciprocity of revelation and participation, 
in the love of man to man, till in the perception 
and appropriation of eternal truth the crown of 
life is attained. 

Civilisation thus affords man the possibility of 
a certain immortality, and the hope of it works 
as a powerful stimulus through the common life. 
Man can place his own individual qualities in 
the achievement and bring vistas of time and 
space that lie far beyond his own material exist- 
ence under his influence. His individuality can, 
as an enduring stream of life, act like a present 
force upon the widest circles. If in particular he 
contributes spiritual qualities of a revolutionary 
and reviving kind, the power of time appears 
unable to get at him. World historical pheno- 
mena have likewise created their influence. 
Consider, for instance, the Greek age and its 
contribution to the formation and exaltation of 
life. With this line of thought, however, no 
matter how highly we esteem it, we cannot end. 
Supreme greatness of this kind is merely the 
lot of a few individuals and ages, and there 
still remains beyond all civilisation the great and 
heavy task that belongs to the realm of ethical 


154 Immortality 


conviction and activity. This reveals new en- 
deavours and also great perplexities. They mani- 
fest man’s confidence in immortality, but they 
go beyond the unbounded length of time that 
marks the cultural life to the immortality of 
man’s spiritual being and preserve for it a life 
that is everlasting. 


Ill 


Man as an ethical being and the possessor of real 
emmortality 


The main question in the ethical problem is 
whether man includes the whole compass of his 
life in a transcendent unity and reaches out from 
this unity to the right relationship with the world 
unity, the sovereign whole of reality. It is of 
course assumed that a spiritual power sustains 
and penetrates the world. The decisive concern 
here deals with the relation of one whole to 
another, and the inner bond that connects us 
with the All and God. To deal with this task 
properly we shall consider the kernel of life that 
lies behind all other activity. We credit action 
with full originality and grant freedom to the 
depths of the soul. We mean by the ethical not 
a limited stratum but an elevation of the whole 
life. But to do justice to this critical stage in its 
full significance we must discard other con- 


The Ethical Basis of Immortality 155 


ceptions of morality that look either too super- 
ficially or narrowly at the problem. Nowadays 
morality is frequently understood as merely 
social, as altruism. The very word altruism 
betrays the weakness of this mode of thinking. 
The expression is derived from the thought world 
of Comte and corresponds to a mode of thought 
that knows neither a self-sufficiency or an inner 
concentration of the soul, nor a spiritual depth 
in reality. Life confines itself here purely to the 
relationship to its material and social environ- 
ment. We willingly recognise that even with 
such a limitation social morality has yielded 
much that is excellent and still does. It has 
contributed much to the deliverance from need 
and suffering, to the alleviation of hardness and 
severity, to the humanising of the relationships, 
but it lacks a firm foundation (in the whole of the 
world order and of the soul), it adheres too much 
to the surface of existence, it dissipates itself too 
much in single undertakings, but above all it 
shuts the eye to the tremendous perplexities 
which lie in the state of man and glides too 
rapidly over the evil that has an unheavenly 
power among us. Therefore this idea of life 
can by no means satisfy us. Accordingly we 
must not confuse the ethical and the practical. 
The latter forms only one side of life, while the 
other includes all provinces. The research stu- 


156 Immortality 


dent and the artist have also ethical functions. 
Theirs is to put the whole of their personality 
into their task and thus to give it a soul. The 
ethical must therefore be metaphysically 
grounded and understood as universal. So 
understood, it gives to life a commanding 
elevation as well as an inner connection with the 
creative grounds of reality. Only now can full 
justice be done to those ideas which actually 
penetrate our whole life, but are often not 
sufficiently recognised in their full significance, 
e.g. the conceptions of personality and duty. 

Personality clearly differentiated from other 
conceptions transcends the particular capacities 
and tendencies of the soul. Here we deal with a 
superior unity which penetrates all derivatory 
ramifications. Personality does not constitute 
a mere background on which single proceedings 
are enacted, but it accomplishes an inner eleva- 
tion of the whole compass of the soul. In it, as 
the kernel and original fount of life, life gains a 
sure superiority over all that is ephemeral and 
not fully human. Man, according to Kant’s 
expression, is “‘first of all a living being, then a 
living and reasonable being, but finally as a 
personality he is a reasonable being responsible 
for his actions.” 

Still clearer is the metaphysical basis of 
ethical activity in the concept of duty. In the 


The Ethical Basis of Immortality 157 


thought of duty a command is recognised, which 
is independent of human choice, but at the same 
time is the definite expression of the liberty and 
self-sufficiency of his spiritual being. Without 
such recognition on its side the thought of duty 
is impotent. The sense of duty in particular 
shows that man belongs to a higher order of 
reality. Where the moral demand with its 
thought of duty gains full consciousness it raises 
the claim to superiority over all other purposes, 
it rejects all consideration of neutrality or expedi- 
ency, and bears witness to something uncondi- 
tional and superhuman that is planted in the 
life of man. Life is thereby essentially exalted. 
The moral independence now striven for leads 
to a deepened idea of the soul, such as is ex- 
pressed in the words of Jesus, “What shall it 
profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose 
his own soul?” Recognition is here made of 
something in the soul which by inherent right 
has incomparable functions, the fulfilment of 
which consecrates the rest of life. The perform- 
ance of the moral function demands liberation 
from the selfishness that adheres to all human 
relationships, from the mechanism that domin- 
ates nature, and also from the sway of human 
instincts. Hence the possibility, yes, the urgent 
demand of an action which is completely in- 
dependent of and often indeed directly opposed 


158 Immortality 


to selfish interests. Could man, however, by his 
own strength assert himself in such an action if 
the power of divine life did not work in him, 
overcoming the opposition and creating an 
ennobling and binding love, which far transcends 
all natural sensuous impulses? ‘T’o the working 
of love there must however correspond the work- 
ing of freedom, in order to show the existence of 
an order that is superior to nature and man’s 
participation in the same. The province of 
experience shows a general chain of causation, 
whose strict operation suffers no exceptions. On 
the ethical plane, on the other hand, there reigns 
the conviction that an action which proceeds 
from mere custom, mechanical compulsion or 
alien pressure, possesses no inner value, that it in 
fact does not belong to the moral domain. 
Accordingly there is required, to make an ethical 
act possible, an order superior to the chain of 
causation, an order without which our action 
loses all originality and therewith its animating 
soul. Only a bond of love and freedom can | 
make us members of a divine realm, and at the 
same time raise us out of the domain of space and 
time. It is perfectly plain that ethical action 
without the principle of a self-dependent spirit- 
ual world is absolutely impossible, that it turns 
the world of experience topsy-turvy. 

All real ethics lead to metaphysics, and this 


The Ethical Basis of Immortality 159 


again shows itself immediately in ethical conduct 
with its conquest of mere nature. Thus we gain 
an entrance into the great problem of immortal- 
ity. Without an ethical basis immortality can- 
not be reached. Before we follow this line of 
argument any further it is necessary to make an 
analysis of the relationship of reason to unreason 
in the world that lies before us, and to make our 
position and task perfectly clear. 

It was Stoicism which first gave to moral 
action a scientific foundation and placed it in a 
systematic world of thought. The earnestness 
and energy of this school has had a lasting 
influence on mankind. But the whole of their 
world-view contains presuppositions which we 
cannot share. Ancient and Christian Idealism 
in their judgment of the world are quite different. 
The ancients regarded the world as a self- 
sufficient closed system which needed no essential 
change. That was a matter of fact, there was no 
problem, there was no true history. According 
to this view our chief function is to behold the 
world, and take it up into our thoughts. Bound 
up with this view is the doctrine, regarded 
as an all-important lesson of life, that the world is 
a realm of reason. The Stoics endeavoured to 
work out this thought, and made it a primary 
aim of philosophy to overcome the unreason 
apparent in the actual state of things. The order 


160 Immortality 


of causation and the uniformity of law appeared 
to them an incontrovertible demonstration of 
divine government. A God must sustain and 
rule the world; an All that has parts that are 
souls must also be a whole that is a soul. God 
had deliberately constituted the world for rea- 
son’s sake, and has included individuals in his 
care. The appearance of ill is only a secondary 
issue in the course of life, and God will turn it to 
good. The philosopher came to be represented 
as an advocate of God, who had to defend Him 
against the doubts and plaints of men and prove 
this a good and acceptable world. Thus sprang 
up the idea of the theodicy, although it was 
Leibniz who first employed the name. The 
Stoics saw the chief ground of error in a false 
estimate of things, and believed that it is the 
seat of feeling with its varied emotions that 
entangles us in all the wants and pains of exist- 
ence. For, according to one of them (Epictetus) 
the things that thwart exercise power only over 
him who regards the false as the true. Things, 
he thinks, do not disturb us, but only our opin- 
ions of things. There must be a total re- 
pudiation. of feeling. The manly soul must 
keep clear not only of an excess of emotions, but 
of every emotion, of lust, pain, and desire. The 
chief object of life is to secure complete peace of 
soul and the repression of every weak feeling. 


The Ethical Basis of Immortality 161 


Thus, however, the whole life is reduced to an 
intellectual and rational affair. There is no 
close relationship to God and what little there is 
left of immortality lacks the inner warmth of 
personal immortality. The self-reliance of the 
spiritually developed man forms here the chief 
principle of high endeavour. The virtuous 
possesses already and as long as he lives the full 
bliss of God. 

The Christian view of ethics, the world and 
immortality is quite different. Christianity by 
no means delivers the world to unreason; it holds 
that the world has been created by a holy and 
gracious world-will in which all spiritual life has 
its root. Life indeed is fundamentally spiritual. 
But now there appears in the state of the world a 
tremendous confusion, the chief reason for which 
lies in moral evil, which is here understood as. a 
defection from and rebellion against the divine 
power. The whole reality is thus terribly 
deranged and the whole meaning of life endan- 
gered. The things that hinder and pervert attain 
such dimensions that a gradual rise by human 
effort alone can reach no decisive result. Every- 
thing that in this direction has been undertaken 
by mere man has soon proved itself ineffective. 
Man’s position would indeed be hopeless if help 
did not come from the whole of life, if a liberating 
and transforming act of God did not take place, 


162 Immortality 


which alone can waken new powers, produce new 
convictions, and save the world from the domin- 
ion of evil. This is the central determinative 
fact in Christianity which declares itself in the 
outflow of divine love and mercy, and the offer 
of a new life by means of an inward union of God 
with man, which yields to man all the fulness of 
life divine and bestows upon him as upon a little 
child the gift of immortality. “In the pure 
childlike mind of humanity there rises up the 
hope of everlasting life and without hope the 
pure faith of humanity in God loses its power.” 
(Pestalozzi). 

In this thought-world there is an essentially 
new attitude to suffering. According to it God 
shares the suffering. ‘There is a special inward- 
ness in the mutual relationship, for a God, who 
in blissful majesty lords it over human destiny, 
remains a distant alien to the soul in its depths. 
It is only a God who shares the suffering, and as 
he shares overcomes, who can bring real help. 
Suffermg here appears not only as a hostile 
hindrance but as the only way to new depths of 
being, yes, to the life of eternity. This signifies 
an inner miracle. By the convulsion of man the 
divine life accomplishes a self-revelation and 
therewith renews man to the uttermost. Here 
the intellectualism and the optimism of the 
ancient philosophy is completely overcome. A 


The Ethical Basis of Immortality 163 


surer way to affirmation is shown, but the 
affirmation must go through negation in order 
to reach its height. The affirmation is burdened 
with so much negation that it drives out com- 
pletely the natural impulses of life. The natural 
I and the spiritual moral self are quite distinct 
entities. Since, however, for the upward striv- 
ing man, even in the hour of victory, the hostile 
and painful do not simply vanish, so this life 
includes the opposing forces of pain and bliss— 
resistance and overcoming. This is well illus- 
trated by Christian Art, particularly by such 
great masters of music as Bach and Handel. 
Christianity sets the soul in perpetual mo- 
tion and reveals to it otherwise undreamt-of 
depths. Is it not remarkable that, according 
to the observation of William James (in his 
well-known work “Varieties of Religious Ex- 
perience’’), almost the only important auto- 
biographies in the literature of the world have 
sprung from the soil of Christianity? There 
arises here a realm of pure inwardness. A 
wonderfully tender intimacy is reached while at 
the same time full courage and strength for the 
battle of life are gained. Man thus reaches a 
supreme greatness while he is called by divine 
power and love to co-operate in the great world 
conflict. This bestows upon him in the midst of 
all needs an incomparable worth and a full con- 


164 Immortality 


sciousness of community with God as well as of a 
sure possession of immortality. Immortality is 
not deduced from single units but from the whole 
of the supreme life. It is of grace and not a work 
of nature. We may adduce the words of 
Augustine: “‘That cannot pass away which for 
God does not perish. God, however, is the Lord 
of the living and of the dead.’ Not the intellec- 
tual, but only the ethical proof, only the for- 
mation of life in common with God the source of 
love, can afford our souls a full consciousness of 
immortality. In the last resort all that is sought 
in this direction is rooted in the absolute trust 
in the love and fidelity of God. 

Isolated approaches do not suffice; it 1s the 
whole of a living communion with God that rises 
above all despair and sorrow and confirms souls 
in the fact of a life superior to the world and 
grounded in God. If all that animated human 
existence with spiritual life and ethical activity 
were extinguished with the dissolution of the 
body, then not only would the whole human race 
but also all the spirituality of time perish and all 
effort and work must break off in the middle of 
striving, and so prove itself without meaning. 
We can let that please us only so long as we 
confine our attention to man, but when the 
conviction fills us that in our domain the creative 
life of the whole reveals itself and also demands 


The Ethical Basis of Immortality 165 


our participation, that implies the upbuilding 
of the spiritual life in the souls and signifies that 
the whole humanity is a divine work. As such it 
cannot perish, and everlasting love will never 
cast us insignificant men away. Weknowthata 
more detailed explication of the idea of immor- 
tality in terms of space and time 1s futile, and that 
our conception with its negations on the one 
hand and its symbols on the other must suffice. 
But we must not therefore think that immortal- 
ity appears only on the fringe of our thought- 
world and that it means a complicated problem. 
For the spiritual ascent of life brings a complete 
reversal. What affects our senses and therefore 
readily holds good as self-evident recedes into 
the distance as soon as we proceed from the 
kernel of life. Here we reach the determinative 
axioms not merely of knowledge but of life which 
lie behind and indeed make possible all our 
activity. We may say with Leibnitz: “God 
is so to speak the lightest and heaviest, the first 
and the lightest in the way of brightness, the 
heaviest and the last in the way of the shadow.” 
So it is with the question of immortality. We 
cannot successfully meet the problem without 
turning from the material to the moral and 
spiritual. | 

It is just such a transformation of values that 
the present time requires. Life has been set 


166 Immortality 


more and more in the material world, and 
has thereby become increasingly superficial. 
Agonising despair gnaws at the vanquished 
spiritual principles of life. The divine is ousted 
too much by that which is petty in man. The 
truly human, however, has developed a great 
self-consciousness, it has done much of impor- 
tance on the periphery of life, but its imner 
behaviour still suffers from a want of compre- 
hensive and exalting aims that are directed 
towards life as a whole, as well as from the sharp 
antagonisms and conflicts that are met with in 
political, national and economic life. In this un- 
speakable confusion man is not able to find him- 
self. The more the external world weighs with 
him, the more it shuts up his inward life. All 
the more necessary is it therefore to reflect upon 
ourselves, to find the only way to the depths of 
life, and in them to gain a firm hold. To such 
depths, however, our concern for immortality 
also leads us. If we do not reach this sure basis, 
then our cultural life is in imminent danger 
of being utterly nullified. Without a con- 
fident faith and a mighty courage the present 
crisis cannot be overcome. 


Science and Immortality 


E. W. Barnes, Sc.D., F.R.S. 


Canon of Westminster, formerly Master of the Temple, and 
previously Fellow and Tutor of Trinity College, 
Cambridge. 


Ir will be convenient to place at the beginning of 
this essay a brief summary of the conclusions 
which its author deems worthy of acceptance; 
but a few preliminary observations may precede 
the summary. It must, in the first place, be ad- 
mitted that some men of science, perhaps a ma- 
jority, will reject the conclusions here set forth. 
Many contend that the belief that biological 
categories cannot be reduced to physical is 
periiously based upon our present ignorance. 
They may grant that psychological categories 
cannot be similarly reduced; but they prefer 
agnosticism to what they regard as_ over- 
confident synthesis. The writer would not 
underrate the value of caution; yet man’s desire 
to unify various branches of thought is as strong 
167 


168 Immortality 


as his conviction that there is a unity in the 
process of which he is a product. Agnosticism 
is a confession of intellectual impotence with 
which man will not and, we suggest, need not 
be satisfied. Again, there are a few men of 
scientific eminence who will condemn the writer 
for ignoring what they deem to be the satis- 
factory evidence for immortality furnished by 
psychical research. To them he can only reply 
that he has failed to find conclusive proof that 
messages can be sent by the dead. He would 
add that it seems impossible to construct, from 
‘““communications”’ which are thought to have 
had such an origin, a conception of immortality 
which has religious values. As this essay deals 
with the general question of sciences and im- 
mortality, the discussion of specifically Christian 
doctrines has no place in it. Christian belief in 
immortality will always be associated with, if not 
based upon, the fact of the Resurrection. But, 
to those who accept the methods of science, the 
isolated fact must be set aside. Science starts by 
framing hypotheses which will explain groups of 
facts; it proceeds to test these hypotheses either 
experimentally or by observing allied pheno- 
mena. Thus a miracle cannot be included in 
strictly scientific inquiry, though it may ulti- 
mately appear to be congruous with the view of 
the universe to which such inquiry leads. The 


Science and Immortality — 169 


existence of this congruity would naturally be 
affirmed by all who accept the Christian faith. 

Briefly stated, the position maintained in the 
present essay is as follows. The belief that 
human personality survives the dissolution of 
the body is neither confirmed nor discredited by 
“natural science.” There is no direct conclusive 
evidence for the existence of consciousness apart 
from life, or for the existence of life apart from 
matter. All our knowledge negatives the fancies 
of transmigration and re-incarnation. Belief in 
human immortality rests on a metaphysical 
basis. It is a corollary from the acceptance of 
ethical theism. Natural science only affects the 
belief in so far as it affects our spiritual interpre- 
tation of the universe. But ethical theism is the 
one satisfactory interpretation which we can 
reach when we attempt to give unity, not only 
to conceptions derived from the physical and 
biological sciences, but also to those which we 
derive from the study of human consciousness. 

As a preliminary to our investigation we must 
briefly describe the assumptions and limitations 
of what we may call the lower branches of science 
and indicate what seems to us to be their relation 
to the facts of consciousness as we observe its 
working in man. The natural sciences are 
constructions of the human mind. They are 
built upon that which Hort termed the “uniform 


170 Immortality 


repetition of likenesses.’’ From observation 
and experiment we construct theories which 
serve to explain certain classes of facts. We 
thus reach “laws of nature’? which are 
provisional working-hypotheses useful within 
restricted domains of nature. Their value con- 
sists in their predictive power. They enable us 
to say what will happen when certain experi- 
ments are repeated. Great success has attended 
the attempts of men of science to formulate 
“laws”? in what we term the inorganic world. 
And, in consequence, the impression grew up and 
still persists that the blind mechanism, by which 
the inorganic world seems to be ruled, prevails 
also among living organisms and ‘conscious 
beings. Thus the triumphal progress of physics 
and chemistry led to a belief that the universe to 
which we belong is the product of certain pro- 
perties inherent in matter. On this view matter 
is the sole ultimate reality; life, presumably, 
must be a peculiar manifestation of properties of 
matter under certain conditions of pressure and 
temperature; and consciousness must be a by- 
product of chemica! changes in certain types of 
living tissue. 

For some time it seemed as if this mechanistic 
interpretation of the world had been confirmed 
by the biological doctrine of evolution. That 
doctrine states that ““man with his whole mental 


Science and Immortality = 171 


and spiritual nature has been derived from lower 
organisms having no such nature, and they 
probably in turn from inorganic aggregates.” 
The evidence of geology, embryology and cog- 
nate sciences makes it impossible to doubt the 
first part of this statement; and, though the 
second part is without experimental confirm- 
ation, 1t is a not unreasonable belief. Assuming 
its truth, it seemed natural to conclude that life 
could be explained as a mechanism; that is to 
say, that laws of the same kind as those which 
seem adequate for the interpretation of physico- 
chemical phenomena would serve to explain 
organic order. But all attempts to reduce 
biological categories to physical have, so far, 
failed. As to what life is in itself we are igno- 
rant. In a living organism there is, as Dr. Hal- 
dane has well said, a certain persistence of 
structure and function in relation to environ- 
ment. Under suitable conditions the relation- 
ship endures for a time; and the organism has 
the power to produce similar organisms in which 
the same persistence recurs. -It is, however, 
an observed fact that the relation of structure, 
function and environment is not exactly repro- 
duced in successive generations. Changes which 
are technically called variations or mutations 
constantly appear. Moreover, if the general 
doctrine of evolution be true, such changes have 


172 Immortality 


led to the production, from primitive organ- 
isms, of a series of divergent developments which 
are surprisingly varied and complex. Such facts 
suggest, not that life can be explained by a 
mechanistic hypothesis, but that physico-chemi- 
cal laws over-emphasise the steady way in 
which free development takes place, to such an 
extent that they seem to leave no place for free 
creative activity. So long as we artificially 
limit our investigations to certain restricted 
types of phenomena, the laws are useful working- 
hypotheses. Within the restricted domain we 
may hope to extend their number and range. 
But as soon as we throw down the barriers which 
we have arbitrarily raised and attempt to de- 
scribe all natural phenomena, including life and 
consciousness, these “‘laws’’ become inadequate. 
If living organisms have been derived from 
inorganic aggregates, we must not assume that 
life can be explained in terms of the convenient 
hypothesis of blind mechanism which we have 
constructed for physics and chemistry. We 
must rather conclude that this hypothesis is only 
a first approximation to the truth; and that 
further knowledge will force us, in Dr. Haldane’s 
words, “‘to transform the present appearance 
of the inorganic world by tracing life in it.” 
Such a transformation would give us a picture 
which would, it seems safe to say, be funda- 


Science and Immortality | 173 


mentally different from that which seems at 
present satisfactory to the physicist. But such 
a picture would not be complete. To get com- 
pletion we need to include, not merely the fact of 
the existence of living organisms which do not 
appear to be conscious; we must also take 
account of the existence of consciousness in the 
higher organisms and of ethical self-consciousness 
in man, if we are to construct some conception 
which gives unity to the visible universe. 

Now, as it seems to the writer, it is legitimate 
to assume that our sensations can convey to us 
knowledge of reality external to ourselves. In 
consciousness we appear to recelve atomic 
sensations. Out of them, their sequence and the 
thoughts to which they give rise, we construct 
our conception of the external world. It may be 
argued that we have consequently knowledge 
only of our mental states. Unless, however, 
we abandon the faith that we can in some meas- 
ure discover absolute truth, we must trust our 
senses when they tell us that we can know facts 
which exist independently of ourselves. We 
must also have faith that we can rightly judge 
values. That is to say, we must believe that the 
qualitative judgments, reached by the thought 
and experience of humanity, are not fanciful but 
correspond to a something which belongs to the 
fundamental character of the universe. Our 


174 Immortality 


moral consciousness must thus be assumed to 
give us knowledge of absolute ethical values. 
The pictures of the external world which we 
make may be, and probably are, imperfect, just 
as the individual’s scale of values is notoriously 
variable. But neither pictures nor values are 
merely arbitrary constructions of our own. 
There is a marked likeness between those which 
we make and those which are made by others in 
the same stage of that mental and moral develop- 
ment which constitutes civilised life. And we 
assume that in themselves they give us an 
approximation, an increasingly close approxi- 
mation, to a knowledge of the actual nature of 
things. 

Our confidence that our faculties enable us to 
perceive and value reality external to ourselves 
cannot be established by cogent argument. It 
must remain an assumption of reasonable faith. 
The faith is reasonable, for in practical life we 
act upon it as a matter of course. We do not, 
in fact, believe that the world constituted by the 
mind is merely the private conception of an 
individual. When we compare our views with 
those of other men we recognise that we may be 
sometimes mistaken in our perception and its 
interpretation; but there is such a similarity in 
our conceptions as to warrant the conclusion 
that we have knowledge of the real world, 


Science and Immortality 175 


which is the world of objective and not merely of 
subjective perception. 

This reasonable faith is a postulate of scientific 
inquiry. When we seek to interpret it we are 
first of all driven to fix attention on the fact that 
our consciousness is not independent of that of 
our fellows. Human personality is not a finished 
entity wholly independent of similar entities. 
It is a focus of consciousness, but between 
various foci there is constant interchange. We 
are taught and we teach; we receive and we send 
out “suggestions.” Alike in our intercourse 
with one another, and in our relations to the 
realm of nature which surrounds us, we are not 
isolated units, subjects definitely sundered from 
objects. There are bonds which make us “mem- 
bers one of another,” and other bonds which 
join us to the system of nature of which we are 
a product. 

Now the bonds which join us to one another 
are primarily qualitative. The strongest of 
them result from the fact that we share common 
value-judgments. We can live in peace and 
harmony with one another only if we subordin- 
ate private self-interests to the higher claims of 
duty and truth. There will always be friction in 
a society of men unless all its members recognise 
that Goodness, Beauty and Truth demand their 
allegiance. To the writer it seems impossible 


176 Immortality 


to believe that this famous trio of values con- 
stitutes a set of convenient abstractions which 
we derive from observation of human life. We 
perceive them as peremptory commands. “You 
must do this. You must love that.” They 
express universal, and not merely private, stand- 
ards and principles. They have, in fact, an 
absolute existence; and so express the nature 
of that ultimate reality which we term Spirit. 
Spirit then is that which, through its attributes 
of Goodness, Beauty and Truth, constitutes the 
bond of unity between apparently self-centred 
individuals. If, as all inquiry leads to believe, 
there is a unity in the cosmic process of which 
man is a product, Spirit must also be the source 
of that unity. Thus, as we pass in turn from 
the physical to the biological sciences and from 
them to the study of human consciousness, we 
are led to a spiritual interpretation of the 
universe. This implies that the laws of nature 
cannot form a closed system as we assume when 
we are thinking in terms of mechanical physics. 
There cannot be invariable sequence in organic 
phenomena, for then man would be a mere auto- 
maton and his belief that he is free to strive for 
spiritual ends would be an illusion. Rejecting 
this view as absurd, we must assume that Spirit 
permits freedom and is free. Natural laws are 
its servants, not its masters. Spirit is the nexus 


Science and Immortality 177 


which joins us to our fellow-men. Spirit, not 
mechanism, is the nexus which gives unity to the 
world of nature. We cannot see the working of 
Spirit in the organic realm, but we may rea- 
sonably suppose that it is there. Its presence 
in all organic life we can only infer from the 
existence of spiritual consciousness in man. 
The theistic interpretation of Spirit we will dis- 
cuss later. For the present we content our- 
selves with saying, in theistic language, that 
God works in the universe in freedom but with- 
out caprice. The system of His making is 
open, not closed; it is not a mechanism independ- 
ent of Him, but one actuated by Him and de- 
signed by Him for ends whose nature is revealed 
by the development of human personality. 

The Christian believes, on the authority of 
Christ, that personal identity survives the 
destruction of the body. In what, however, 
does personal identity consist? Certainly not in 
the contents of the mind, for these are continu- 
ally changing. So different is the mind of a 
grown man from the mind of the same individual 
when a child that it is difficult to perceive any 
similarity between the two. Hence Buddhist 
speculation asserts, and ascribes the teaching to 
Buddha himself, that, while the body has relative 
permanence, the mind is in constant process of 
perishing as one thing and being born as another. 


178 Immortality 


But the body changes remarkably in appearance 
from infancy to old age; and, though we may 
reject as a popular superstition the idea that it is 
completely renewed every seven years, neverthe- 
less some of the material particles of which 
it is composed are altered, not only after every 
meal, but with every breath we take. Professor 
Taylor suggests that the identity of the body is 
preserved ‘“‘by continuous development through 
successive phases according to a definite law of 
growth.” But the law of growth is not definite 
in the sense that it is wholly independent of 
environment. It expresses the manner in which 
the organism develops by making use of its 
surroundings; but at any moment it is, to use a 
mathematical term, to some degree a function of 
the past physical history of the body. Thus 
bodily identity in a living organism appears to be 
determined by the fact of continuous develop- 
ment. The material contents of the body are 
always changing. Its formal structure may 
be altered by accident, its chemical reactions 
by disease. Its law of growth at any stage 
is partly dependent upon its past history. Its 
identity remains because there is no breach of 
continuity in that interaction of structure, 
function and environment which we term its life. 

There is a close parallel between mind and 
body when we seek to determine what we mean 


Science and Immortality 179 


by personal identity. In order that our person- 
ality may be the same as it was a year ago, it is 
not necessary that the contents of the mind 
should be the same. Some experiences and the 
concepts to which they have given rise will have 
been registered in the memory during the year. 
There will be consequent changes in the way in 
which we react to external circumstances. We 
may be better or worse, wiser or more foolish 
men. But each one of us will retain his personal 
identity, will be the same man, because there 
has been a continuous development of mental 
and moral character. Save possibly for periods 
of unconsciousness in sleep, there will have been 
no breach of continuity. Mind and character at 
any moment are the integration of past experi- 
ences and of the manner in which we have 
reacted to them. It does not seem legitimate 
therefore to assume that in personality there is 
any “‘soul-substance”’ which does not change. 
““Soul”’ is created, through the operation of that 
ultimate reality which we term Spirit, by a com- 
plex process in which racial history and environ- 
ment are primary agents. 

Modern psychological research has established 
the fact that in the “unconscious mind”’ experi- 
ences which we have apparently forgotten are 
stored. At times they can be brought again 
to consciousness by the methods of psycho- 


180 Immortality 


analysis. Yet there is no proof, nor even proba- 
bility, that all past experiences are thus safely 
kept. It seems to be true that the unconscious 
mind is not “‘a mere aggregate of fringes of con- 
sciousness”’ but an extended domain of the mind 
where mental processes, of which we are un- 
aware, take place. In this domain we may 
unwittingly receive suggestions and, when their 
results become manifest, they may profoundly 
affect conduct. But we must not regard the 
conscious and unconscious mind together as a 
sort of bog in which all our experiences are 
stored, the bog itself constituting our un- 
changeable “soul-substance.”’ Our personality 
at any moment is both a continuous development 
of, and is dependent upon, its earlier phases. 
To the writer it seems impossible to dissociate 
such dependence from memory; and therefore 
any theories of “reincarnation” or “‘trans- 
migration of souls,’ which assume that person- 
ality can continue to exist though memory be 
destroyed, are meaningless. Such theories are 
often supposed to reconcile the inequalities of 
human life with Divine justice. But it does not 
seem just that God should punish me for sins 
which He has erased from my memory. 

The question now arises as to whether personal 
identity can continue to exist apart from the 
body with which it is, in our experience, invari- 


Science and Immortality 181 


ably associated. Is personal identity independ- 
ent of bodily identity? Can any kind of con- 
sciousness exist apart from living organisms? 
It must be frankly admitted that the natural 
sciences give us no direct evidence that we can 
answer these questions in the affirmative. At- 
tempts have been made to show that, in man, 
mind has a greater relative independence of the 
body than in the lower mammalia. It may be 
so. But the fact does not enable us safely to 
argue for actual independence. Moreover, we 
can only perceive consciousness whose expres- 
sion, to use a wireless metaphor, is attuned 
to our own receptive capacity. The hills and 
streams may sing for joy before the Lord; the 
planets, as many an ancient thinker of repute 
believed, may have souls; but we cannot have 
knowledge of such facts. To us they are, and 
must remain, superstitions. We reject them, 
together with other fancies by which anti- 
intellectualists degrade religion. But we do 
well to remember that the natural sciences by 
their very nature are imperfect instruments of 
inquiry. We approach minds other than our 
own through material media. So to the physio- 
logist consciousness appears as a by-product of 
certain specialised forms of living tissue. Huxley 
as is well known, regarded it as nothing more than 
an “‘epi-phenomenon.” When, however, in his 


182 Immortality 


Romanes lecture he spoke of war between man 
and the cosmic process, he gave to human 
personality an independence greater than his 
theory allows. 

It is indisputable that in man there is an inti- 
mate relation between the mind and the brain. 
If we cut off the supply of oxygen to the brain, 
consciousness immediately ceases. The secre- 
tions produced by certain glands in the body 
markedly affect the mind. The influence, for 
example, of the thyroid gland has been demon- 
strated by the discovery of the pathology and 
cure of cretinism. By the artificial use of thy- 
roid extract a dull child, defective in character 
and intelligence, can be made normal. The 
effects of gout or high blood-pressure on the 
temper, the mental malaise due to “liverish- 
ness,” clearly indicate that the body affects the 
mind. There is no doubt that medical research 
will greatly extend our knowledge of how the 
chemistry of the body is associated with the 
working of the brain. The body is an elaborate 
chemical manufactory. If its harmonious work- 
ing is impaired by the defect of glandular secre- 
tions, or by the presence of poisons—whether 
introduced as chemical substances or originating 
within the body to give rise to what is vaguely 
called “auto-intoxication’’—the brain may cease 
to function properly. Again, considerable pro- 


Science and Immortality 183 


gress has been made in “‘mapping-out the brain.” 
Particular areas of the brain are necessary both 
for the projection of personality in the form of 
movement or speech, and for the perception 
of impressions from external objects through 
various senses. Many of these areas have now 
been located with considerable accuracy. Thus 
a surgeon has frequently been enabled to remove 
a brain tumour which was located because it 
gave rise to loss of speech or paralysis of a limb. 
That other areas of the brain are necessary for 
the association of perceptions, though less 
completely proved, appears most probable. 
Owing to the development of such areas in the 
evolution of man from his anthropoid ancestry, 
he has become homo sapiens. Because of this 
fact the anthropologist can measure fossil skulls, 
estimate the size of the cerebral cortex, and so 
assign them to a fairly definite stage in human 
evolution. Biologically speaking, man has be- 
come what he is owing to the development of his 
brain. The emergence of that type of con- 
sciousness which we call human personality has 
been made possible by changes in the physical 
structure of the brain and, probably, by changes 
in the chemical processes associated with its 
working. 
We have little evidence as to the relation be- 
tween thought and physical activity in the brain. 


184 Immortality 


It is, for instance, unknown whether for the 
persistence of memory there must be some 
definite arrangement of molecules within the 
brain. It seems probable that, in Hort’s words, 
““man’s whole mental and spiritual nature is 
conditioned by his physical nature and _ its 
[physiological] states, no mental or spiritual 
movement taking place without a corresponding 
physical movement.” But, as Hort pointed out, 
such a truth, if indeed it be entirely true, 
contributes nothing to the proof or disproof of 
immortality. It is the statement of a particular 
class of facts and it implies by its want of self- 
sufficiency the existence of other classes of facts. 
We can assert that the existence upon earth of 
that particular type of consciousness which we 
term human personality has been made possible 
by the evolution of the human brain, and, pace 
the spiritualists, that for its complete mani- 
festation to us the brain must be physiologically 
intact. But of the nature of human conscious- 
ness itself and of the reason for its existence and 
for the values which it can carry, biological 
investigations tell us little or nothing. We 
need to take account of other classes of facts, 
psychological and metaphysical, if we would 
pursue the inquiries which are fundamental in 
the problem of immortality. 

The doctrine of evolution indicates the way in 


Science and Immortality 185 


which human personality has been developed. 
It may be that in primitive organisms some de- 
gree of nascent mind exists. If so, we cannot 
perceive it. External stimuli seem in lowly 
forms of life to produce purely mechanical 
reflexes. It is not dawning consciousness, for 
instance, which makes the flowers turn towards 
the sun. But out of pure reflexes, if indeed they 
be pure, some degree of primitive memory seems 
to arise as organisms develop. Such racial 
memory, when unaccompanied by thought, ap- 
pears as instinct. Subsequently there arises 
associative memory, the capacity of the in- 
dividual for learning by experience. Birds teach 
their young; their life is not the mere life of 
instinct. Then rational thought develops and 
the power to reason leads to the capacity to 
frame abstract concepts. Out of this capacity 
the intellectual, moral and spiritual character 
of human personality has emerged. Continuous 
though this inconceivably long process has 
been, it seems impossible to regard it as a mere 
unfolding of what was already latent. New 
qualities, new values, have gradually come into 
existence. None of us would talk of an intel- 
lectual bird, a moral dog or a religious monkey. 
The human mind, whatever its origin, is a new 
creation. Weare, in literal truth, of more value 
than the sparrows. 


186 Immortality 


The development of man from his pre-human 
ancestry has been fundamentally a mental 
process. At first the size, and presumably there- 
fore the capacity, of the brain increased. It 
may be that for the last hundred thousand 
years such increase has been slight. But the de- 
velopment of speech, and latterly the develop- 
ment of writing, have made it possible for hu- 
man society to integrate its mental advances; 
and in this way the development of human 
personality has been rapid. What is the mean- 
ing of the result? What is the cause which lies 
behind the sequence of changes which have led 
to the human mind? What is the end which the 
result of the changes serves? The old teleology 
which found evidences of design everywhere in 
nature has vanished. Darwin showed how 
organic structures, so ingenious that to our fore- 
fathers 1t seemed as if they must have been 
made by an intelligent bemg, might have come 
into existence by the “‘non-purposive mechan- 
ism” of natural selection. He even wrote: 
“There seems to be no more design in the 
variability of organic beings, and in the action 
of natural selection, than in the course which the 
wind blows.” There is good reason to doubt this 
statement. It implies that evolution may be 
completely explained by a mechanistic theory 
similar to “‘laws’’ which seem adequate in the 


Science and Immortality 187 


restricted domain of physical phenomena. It 
ignores the fact that we are ignorant of the 
origin of organic variations. It seems, more- 
over, to postulate complete freedom of variabil- 
ity whereas, at any stage, the kind of variation 
possible to an organism is almost certainly 
limited by its nature. We do not “gather 
grapes of thorns.” There is a harmony in the 
evolutionary sequence of changes. They are 
not purely fortuitous. Man, in fact, has not 
been turned out of nature’s workshop by the 
automatic working of a blind mechanism. 

The old limited teleology must be abandoned. 
But the wider teleology, which assumes that in 
the whole evolutionary process there is pur- 
posive action directed to a definite end, is left 
intact by biological inquiry. We cannot deny 
that in the evolutionary development of life upon 
the earth there has been progress, culminating 
in man; and, by progress, we mean the successive 
appearance of powers and qualities which we 
unanimously accept as valuable. We cannot 
interpret such progress without assuming that it 
is due to an intelligent Will. It is true that 
at every stage progress has been largely deter- 
mined by environment, and that the whole 
scheme by which human personality has been 
evolved seems ultimately dependent on certain 
properties of inorganic matter. This leads us to 


188 Immortality 


recognise that there is a unity in the universe, not 
merely a unity which links living organisms to- 
gether, but a unity between ourselves and the 
matter of which the earth, the solar system and 
the whole galactic universe are made. What 
kind of unity? One, we have answered, which 
expresses the action of an intelligent Will. If we 
inquire as to the purpose and nature of this Will, 
we must examine the values which it has brought 
into existence. They are the spiritual absolutes 
of Goodness, Beauty and Wisdom. And the 
Will to whom we ascribe these attributes we 
term God. The universe, which within the 
restricted domain of the natural sciences seems a 
closed mechanical system, is ultimately pur- 
posive and spiritual. Only by false, because 
partial, limitations of experience can any other 
view seem plausible. Man has been created for a 
spiritual purpose and must serve a spiritual end. 

It is often urged that such conclusions, so far 
as they are valid, when combined with the 
modern scientific outlook, lead naturally to a 
pantheistic view of the universe. The world, it 
_is said, is as necessary to God as He is tothe 
world. God is immanent and not transcendent; 
potential, not actual; realising Himself in a pro- 
cess of which human personality is the highest 
product known to us. Such a doctrine of pure 
immanence implies that the spiritual exists only 


Science and Immortality 189 


in the phenomenal world. If we accept it, we 
effectively banish God. As Dean Inge says: 
**A God who is gradually coming into His own 
is not yet God, and there is no reason to suppose 
that such a Being exists.” Though theism fails 
to solve the problem of evil, pantheism cannot 
escape the logical conclusion that evil and good- 
ness are equally divine. Attempts to evade the 
pessimistic conclusions of pantheism have led 
men to construct imaginary pictures of the future. 
We are bidden to look forward to a time when, if 
not on this earth, yet on some hypothetical 
planet to which humanity or its evolved product 
has migrated, spiritual values are perfected. 
Such an idea is crude Jewish apocalypticism 
decked out with fanciful pseudo-scientific finery. 
It is certain that man will not establish on this 
earth an everlasting kingdom of righteousness. 
“Here we have no abiding city.’’ Our sun is, in 
the technical language of Russell and Hertz- 
sprung, a yellow dwarf star. It has already 
passed its period of maximum heat and is 
steadily on its way to extinction. Astronomers 
tell us that for the age of our stellar system we 
may take some figure like 10,000 million years. 
Such at least is Professor Eddington’s con- 
jecture, though it is not quite twenty times 
larger than that of Dr. Jeans. The latter 
suggests that the age of our solar system is some 


190 Immortality 


300 million years. Let us grant that the earth 
will still support life for 100 million years; most 
astronomers would probably say that it is a 
fantastically high estimate. Yet the period is 
finite. The end will come, when all man’s 
spiritual victories, when all the spiritual attain- 
ments of whatever animals may come after man, 
will be obliterated. ‘The God who has realised 
Himself must begin again. We can hardly take 
seriously the super-aeroplanes by which its 
inhabitants will succeed in preserving the God 
who dwells in them from extinction on the dying 
earth. Dr. Jeans suggests that the solar system 
may be a freak product, with few or no analogues 
among the two thousand million stars of which 
the galactic universe seems to be composed. 
Some would have us grant that another planet 
with pressure and temperature conditions suited 
to earth’s inhabitants will in the future be 
discovered and reached, and that the process of 
discovery and migration will be continued 
indefinitely ; but they are implicitly asking for a 
God outside phenomena, who for His own pur- 
pose has pre-ordained this complex machinery. 
The truth is that no permanent spiritual pur- 
pose can be achieved by a purely immanent God. 
Either the spiritual world exists independently 
of this world or it is a mere name given to a set 
of ultimately fruitless ideals. If we postulate 


Science and Immortality 191 


a rational universe and seek to interpret the 
spiritual values whose existence we perceive, we 
must assume with Dr. Haldane that “behind our 
blurred vision of the world lie the love and power 
of God.” The natural sciences emphasise the 
truth that God acts through phenomena. They 
make it impossible to preserve the old dualism 
of natural and supernatural. This conception 
is based on the belief that “nature”? forms a 
closed mechanical system into which, for its 
better working, “‘supernatural’’ occurrences are 
occasionally introduced. The truth is rather 
that “nature”’ is the scene of continuous spirit- 
ual activity. It is the process designed by God 
to work out His spiritual purpose. But God 
is not merely correlative to the world. Though 
He is necessary to its existence, it is not neces- 
sary to His own. Goodness, Beauty and Wis- 
dom have been produced on earth as the result of 
His process. But they belong to an eternal 
realm of spiritual values; the realm in which 
ideals are realised as ideas. An ideal is, in Dr. 
Inge’s words, that which “‘ought to be, but is 
not’’; an idea is its absolute and perfect arche- 
type. Ideas are the attributes of Ged, construc- 
tive values which must have eternal existence 
with Him in the spiritual universe which lies 
behind, and reveals itself imperfectly within, 
phenomena. If they do not exist as absolutes, 


192 Immortality 


His existence can have no meaning. He would 
be always trying to come into His own and 
always failing; always fighting, and never win- 
ning final victory. There could be no “realm of 
ends’’ which constitutes His kingdom. 

It is often assumed that modern science, by 
picturing the universe as an evolutionary process 
has made a vast change in religious thought. 
This is fundamentally untrue. Christianity has 
always regarded human life as a process. It is, 
in familiar language, a pilgrimage to another 
world; a way along which men must carry the 
Cross if they would gain the crown. Process 
and imperfection, confusion and unrealised ideals 
are inherent init. Amid the dust and smoke of 
conflict personality is being made; but we must 
seek elsewhere for its final perfecting. Modern 
science has merely extended such conceptions to 
the whole realm of nature. In that realm, 
process and imperfection, confusion and un- 
realised ideals, are inherent. But the same 
spiritual purpose which gives its ultimate mean- 
ing to the life of man works within the whole 
evolutionary process of the universe. The whole 
system of the world is a unity; and the Christian 
interpretation of human life can be extended to 
embrace that system in its entirety. God works 
through nature as through man. He is the 
source of the spiritual bonds which link human 


Science and Immortality 193 


lives together; but He is also the final and 
efficient cause without which events would lack 
their observed coherence. 

It has been necessary to discuss the relation 
of modern science to Theism because, as Dr. 
Rashdall has well said, “‘ belief in God and belief 
in Immortality must in the long run stand or fall 
together.” If it be held that science supports 
a materialist philosophy, then obviously human 
personality does not survive bodily dissolution. 
If pantheism be the true interpretation of the 
universe, we may be imperfect manifestations of 
Divine activity which will be continued in the 
life of the race; but our survival after death as 
individuals there seems no reason to postulate. 
The belief in human immortality then persists, 
if at all, as the unreasoned consequence of blind 
instinct. Only if God, and consequently His 
realm of absolute values, exist mdependently 
of phenomena, can we find a reason and a place 
for the continued existence of human personality. 
The reason, briefly stated, is that God is not the 
God of the dead but of the living. In putting 
on Christ men put on immortality. Human 
personality, unlike other types of consciousness 
known to us, exists not merely in time and 
space, but also in the realm of spiritual values. 
These values must be eternal and indestructible 
with God. In so far as human life is trans- 


~ 


194 Immortality 


formed by them, it ceases to be merely life in 
time and becomes what the Fourth Evangelist 
terms Eternal Life, that is to say, life with God. 
We have experience both of life in the flesh and 
of life in the Spirit. The latter alone carries with 
it the promise of immortality. 

Those who accept the Christian idea of God 
start from a belief that the universe is rational. 
Observation of human life forces them to the 
conclusion that it would be irrational if human 
personality were destroyed by the death of the 
body. ‘There must be some other kind of exist- 
ence for which the earthly life of man is intended 
to be the preparation. Our present existence 
does not satisfy our aspirations towards know- 
ledge and holiness. There is an enormous dis- 
parity between our spiritual capacities and the 
meagre achievements possible in three-score years 
and ten. Often enough the hero and the saint 
perish miserably because of their spiritual excel- 
lence. If we believe that God is just, reason 
forces us to call a new world into existence to 
redress the balance of the old. That world is, 
in Christian language, the kingdom of Heaven. 

Speculation with regard to life after death is, of 
necessity, barren. We cannot conceive of per- 
sonality without some vehicle for its expression. 
Consequently in many periods Christians have 
believed in the resurrection of this present flesh 


Science and Immortality 195 


of ours; that, at the last day, our bodies would be 
reconstituted as tenements for the soul. A 
knowledge of elementary chemistry negatives 
such a fancy. St. Paul suggested that, in place 
of the natural body, God would provide a spirit- 
ual body which would be a suitable instrument 
for the expression of personality. Such a view 
belongs to the domain, not of scientific theory, 
but of spiritual imagination, which is, we may 
add, by no means the domain of spiritual fancy. 
It still commends itself, for we must insist upon 
the value and reality of the individual life. A 
rational explanation of human endeavour cannot 
be given if all that survives of the personality 
which we have built up on earth is some vague 
essence distilled by consciousness. Individual- 
ity must be preserved if each of us is a definite 
object of God’s love. It is natural to assume 
that the purification and enrichment of person- 
ality which take place on earth through service to 
God will be continued hereafter. If so, the 
initial stages of the life hereafter will be in time. 
Yet, when personality is perfected, it seems 
natural to assume that time and individuality 
will be alike transcended. In complete and 
final communion with God we shall get that 
complete and timeless communion with other 
souls of which on earth we have rare and fleeting 
experience. 


196 Immortality 


Such a conclusion will seem to many to have 
no place in the scheme of the universe which men 
of science have, since the Renaissance and more 
especially during the last hundred years, been 
laboriously constructing. Yet I am convinced 
that it is the sort of imterpretation of man’s 
relation to the world, to which the final synthesis 
of scientific investigation will ultimately lead. 
We will end by recapitulating its leading features. 
The material world of the physical sciences is not 
the real world. It is a construction made by the 
human mind out of certain classes of facts; and 
it only suffices us so long as other classes of facts 
are ignored. When we extend our investi- 
gations, and seek to include the realm of animate 
nature in our picture, we take a more compre- 
hensive but none the less a limited survey of the 
universe. At this stage the hypothesis of blind 
mechanism becomes unsatisfactory. We per- 
ceive that there is a creative process at work, an 
element of free development within the appar- 
ently closed system. Finally as we bring con- 
sciousness and, in particular, human personality 
into our inquiry, the character of the creative 
process is disclosed. It is the product of a 
Divine Mind working towards definite ends, 
bringing into existence beings who can begin 
to think His thoughts and understand His 
values. We can measure the galactic universe 


Science and Immortality 197 


and enter into the minute structure of the atom 
because we are in some measure of union with 
God. For the same reason, the moral law 
constrains us. We recognise, albeit imperfectly, 
the claims of duty and truth; we make a spiritual 
valuation of life. So we are led to the belief that 
spiritual values have a real objective existence; 
that they are manifestations of the nature of 
God. As we participate in these values we 
appear to create them. But the truth is rather 
that they make us; in so far as we can work them 
into our lives we enter the kingdom of God. 
That kingdom is the eternal spiritual world, 
the realm of those ends for which God has 
planned the cosmic process. Consciousness in 
man has acquired a new nature in becoming 
spiritual. In Christian language it has been 
transformed in putting on Christ. By virtue 
of the Christ-Spirit 1t has become a fact of the 
ultimate real world. Because that world is 
eternal we shall find in it our immortality. 


Immortality in the Poets 
Maurice H. Hewett 


Ir is true, as Sir Philip Sidney tells us, that 
“‘Nature never set forth the earth in so rich a 
tapestry as divers poets have done, neither with 
pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet smelling 
flowers, nor whatsoever else may make the too 
much loved Earth more lovely.” The poet’s 


business is to enhance, in mere ecstasy of gusta-. 


tion, that which, for mortal men needs no adorn- 
ment. All men share to some extent his ecstasy; 
but the poet 1s the body, form and pressure of the 
time, its highest expression. His emotion is 
called forth by his reading of his world; so far as 
he is man he is man’s advocate, so far as he is 
inspired he is our priest. What we believe, hope 
or desire, that does he; but the yearnings and 
intuitions which strike us dumb sting him to 
utterance. He is our best mind made vocal. 
Now it may be that our weakness has always 
been to love the world too much, and that the 
poets, in expressing us, have intensified it. “‘O 
198 


& 


Immortality in the Poets 199 


me! O me! How [I love the earth, and the 
seasons, and weather, and all things that deal 
with it, and all that grows out of it—as this has 
done!” And “this’’ for the maid in the fable, 
voicing the heart of William Morris—‘“this”’ 
was an old house of grey ashlar set in a valley 
between low hills, and half hidden in trees. It 
stood for all that Morris knew certainly and 
loved, obscured for him that which he doubted of 
and dreaded—Morris, who would never speak or 
think of death if he could anyways avoid it. 
And that has been at most times, with certain 
exceptions, the way of men. Illumination has 
come, rarely, and a veil been withdrawn. In- 
spired revelation has, for seasons together, com- 
manded assent. Unless the inspiration should 
hold or be renewed, assent would decline; and 
once more man would seek the bosom of his 
mother the Earth, and look for no better thing 
at the last than to lie quietly there, his little 
life “rounded in a sleep.” The poet, a little 
better than the best of men, is stilla man. If 
he were not, perhaps, he would be the less a poet. 
“Though I speak with the tongues of men and of 
angels, and have not love, I am become as 
sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.” And 
the love which St. Paul had there in mind was 
mortal love. 

Something flows out of that. The poet is a 


200 Immortality 


man, and his poesy the best of him, his darling 
thought. If he identified himself with it there is 
no wonder. If in his pride he cries aloud, 


Nor marble, nor the gilded monuments 
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme, 


it is very possible that he will content himself 
with immortality in that kind, heedless of any 
other. More, he may expect it of us too: 


You still shall live (such virtue hath my pen) 
Where breath most breathes—even in the mouths of men. 


It is perhaps a tragic revelation of his infirmity 
that while his imagination enables him to gauge 
the perishable quality of this world, he will 
nevertheless entrust it with his fame—yet so it 
is. He is not able to conceive of immortality 
apart from his verse, does not care to conceive it 
apart from his love. The soul of Adonais was 
““where the Eternal are,’ but beaconed “‘to us 
on Earth,” and maintained the relationship 
without which Shelley could not imagine its ex- 
istence. Such is the poet, whose genius, though 
it burn heavenward like a flame, is both kindled 
and fed by this earth—which may be blown to 
dust and nothingness at any moment. 

We look rather to the poets, then, for trans- 
cendent expression than for transcending 


Immortality in the Poets 201 


thought. Poetry is a transfiguration of thought; 
if the thought conceives and quickens, another 
generation will bring forth. So it was that 
Christianity gave birth to notions which had 
been dimly discerned and doubtfully fore- 
shadowed in Egypt, in Asia and in Hellas. The 
ancients, predecessors if not heralds of Christ, 
accepted the doctrine of the soul’s immortality, 
though (with certain exceptions) they allowed 
nothing for it. Ancestor-worship, hero-worship, 
imply the belief; the burning, with sacrifice, 
of the dead had a ritual significance which points 
to the soul’s continuance and need of comfort. 
But continuance of what sort? Homer’s 
‘House of Hades” wasalimbo. The souls in it, 
and those which were shut out of it, were ghosts 
—“ineffectual shadows,” said Andrew Lang, 
“unfed, unfeared, unworshipped . . . from the 
House of Hades they never return.’? And he 
quotes Achilles in the Odyssey: ‘‘ Rather would 
I on earth be the hind of a landless man than 
King over all the dead.” This is far from 
Christian doctrine with its concomitants of 
reward and punishment, redemption and repro- 
bation; far from what the Mysteries fore- 
shadowed, or what Plato, probably believed; but 
it is as far as the common mind uttered by the 
poets will take us. Consider the Anthology 
which, more certainly than Homer or the 


202 + Immortality 


dramatists, gives us average opinion at its best. 
Macedonius bids earth farewell: he has run his 
race, and departs, not knowing whither he is to 
travel. Another dead poet refuses sacrifice and 
garlands at his tomb. “‘Drenching my ashes 
with wine, you will but make mud of them”’; 
and as for your libations, ody 6 Savoy métat: “a 
dead man does not drink.”” Even so, again and 
again we find the impossibility men felt of con- 
ceiving of another life unrelated to this one. 
“T died,” says one, “but await you. You too 
will wait for someone. Death awaits us all.” 
And Plato cries to his beloved: 


My star, once on the quick as Morning Star 
Thy light was shed; 

A Star of Even now, thou shinest afar 
Upon the dead. 


There was little comfort there. With a common 
lot for us all, this life was best. The gods could 
not help us if they would. 

The Latin religion was of the earth earthy, its 
gods were demons resident in the things of this 
world. Janus, with two faces, lived in a gate; 
Vesta was the good fairy of the hearth; Faunus 
watched over cattle; Quirmus was god of war; 
Terminus was a mear-stone. Upon that primi- 
tive stuff was imposed the theology of Hellas; 
upon the compounded brew orgiastic cults from 


Immortality in the Poets 203 


Egypt and Syria. The poets went no further 
than their fellow-citizens; some indeed lagged 
behind them, protesting. Lucretius was such a 
one. He was driven to admit phantasms of the 
dead, “traces left, somehow, on something.” 
They had, however, no root in nature; they were 
subjective experiences, freaks of memory. 
“This I will put forward,” he says, “that we may 
not haply believe that souls break loose from 
Acheron or that shades fly about among the 
living, or that something of us is left behind after 
death, when the body and the nature of the 
mind, destroyed together, have taken their 
departure into their several first beginnings.”’ 
That is the exordium of his fourth book which 
immediately expounds his argument. Mind and 
soul alike are mortal with the body. Birth is 
the beginning, Death is the end. Yet death is 
nothing, “concerns us not at all.” “It matters 
no whit whether we have been born into life at 
any other time when immortal death has taken 
away our mortal life.” A stern philosophy, 
leading as often as not whither it led this 
son of Epicurus. Tennyson gives him fair ex- 
pression: 


. . . that hour perhaps 
Is not so far when momentary man 
Shall seem no more a something to himself, 
But he, his hopes and hates, his homes and fanes, 


204, Immortality 


And even his bones long laid within the grave, 
The very sides of the grave itself shall pass, 
Vanishing, atom and void, atom and void, 
Into the unseen for ever . . 


He was a stout heart who faced that bald and 
blank outlook, who taught himself to look for a 
life to come in the Roman race; who 


metus omnes et inexorabile fatum 
Subjecit pedibus, strepitumque Acherontis avari. 


Upon that unlikely tilth in due time was cast the 
Christian seed. 

Christian doctrine, systematised, worked upon, 
philosophised by latter-day Greek thought, laid 
down an eschatology which has never substan- 
tially varied. The creed of Nicea is still its 
formula. Dependent upon it is the Christian 
ethic which still holds good, though rather as a 
premiss than as a conclusion. The resurrection 
of the dead implies that of the body; the blisses of 
Heaven and pains of Hell may be taken literally 
as discernible by bodily sense. In such terms 
the Christian poets sang of the world to come. 
From the Apocalypse to the Divine Comedy there 
was no variation except in handling. The late- 
Latin hymns come in between: one is that 
beautiful thing which closes with a vision of 
Heaven— 


Immortality in the Poets 205 


Pax ibi florida, pascua vivida, viva medulla, 
Nulla molestia, nulla tragoedia, lachryma nulla! 

O sancta potio, sancta refectio, pax animarum, 

O pius, o bonus, o placidus sonus, hymnus earum! 


Another, but a later, is the terrific Dies Ire with 
its tocsin note: 


Tuba mirum spargens sonum 
Per sepulcra regionum, 
Coget omnes ante thronum. 


Such poems are as materialistic as the Doom of 
Orcagna, charged less with imagination than 
with dogma. There is chapter and verse for 
every detail of the ornament and every crotchet 
of the music. The mind of man had been broken 
by the Church to conformity. The poets be- 
lieved; belief was of obligation; they were fer- 
vent in belief; but they revealed no more than 
had been sanctioned. 

Even Dante was no great innovator. His 
epic of Heaven and Hell was not the first of 
such poems. There were a Journey of St. Bran- 
dan, a St. Patrick’s Purgatory, a Vision of Tun- 
dale, and whatnot. What he did was to give 
imperishable form to the beliefs of an Age, to 
express them in terms of dogmatic theology; to 
shape the whole into an allegory of the passage of 
man through this world and another. “The 


206 Immortality 


subject of the whole work,” he says in his letter 
to Can Grande, “taken literally, is the state of 
souls after death, regarded as a fact; for the 
action deals with this, and is about this. But 
if the work be taken allegorically, its subject is 
man, in so far as by merit or demerit in the 
exercise of free will he is exposed to the rewards 
or punishments of justice.”’ I could not, myself, 
admit for a moment that the allegory extends to 
the persons of the poem—that Dante stands for 
Every-Man, Virgil for human knowledge, or 
Beatrice for divine theology. Heavenly love, 
apocalyptic vision, were inspired in Dante by 
human love, and by a vision which saw Beatrice 
fair among the daughters of men, and Virgil 
chief among the poets. “He had it in his heart 
to yield such honour to Virgil . . . as none had 
ever paid, and to write concerning Beatrice, 
‘what had not been written before of any 
woman.’”’ And, as Symonds goes on to say, the 
whole poem is replete with his earthly experience. 
His enemies are in torment, or suing out their 
purgation on the Mountain; his friends are in 
bliss. He allows his private judgment to vary 
ever so little the teaching of the Church. Virgil 
is allowed into Purgatory, Trajan and Ripheus 
are in Paradise, carnal sin is granted its allevi- 
ation—there shall never be separation of Paolo 
and Francesca. Dante’s materialism in fact is 


Immortality in the Poets 207 


illuminated and sometimes transcended by his 
genius. If it is not more impressive than the 
Revelation of St. John it is more beautiful— 
because it is more human. 

Art conceals a system in the Divine Comedy as 
rigid as that of the Summa Theologie. Every 
step 1s premeditated; the poem moves on by the 
clock and the almanac. The sites are all fixed; 
one could make a chart of the circles of the pit 
and stages of ascent of the mount; one could lay 
down the involutions of the spheres, and find 
within them by the compasses the heart of the 
Mystic Rose. The colours of things seen are as 
clear as Fra Angelico’s: Uaer bruno, the dolce 
color d oriental saphiro, the tremolar della marina, 
the 


ombra smorta 
Qual’ sotto foglie verdi e rami nigri 
Sopra suoi freddi rivi |’Alpe porta; 


and so with the persons moving in this positive 
landscape: historical or allegorical, there is no 
faltering in the drawing of them. Dante bor- 
rows from the writer of the Apocalypse, from 
Ezekiel, Daniel, Isaiah, and hardens, outlines 
and defines what he takes. His vision of the 
world dz la is absolute, and more so, apparently, 
for the very limitations of the knowledge upon 
which it proceeded. ‘The souls he sees sousing 


208 Immortality 


in Hell, the painful initiates on the Mount of 
Purgation, the white-stoled Convent of Heaven 
are gathered from a square of thrice ten-score 
miles, and represent the memories of a hundred 
years, or the thumb-marks of a few classics. 
Yet his grip is so sure, and his scope so wide, you 
think that you see the whole world under his 
span. He was in that world, indeed, but not of 
it. As, when he had reached the eighth starry 
Heaven, he could look down through the seven 
spheres— 


e vidi questo globo 
Tal, ch’io sorrisi del suo vil sembiante— 


so it had been with him since Love first raised 
him up. He could hold the spinning thing in his 
hand; there was no difficulty there.’ The 
triumph was that out of particulars so few and 
insignificant he could read universal law so vast. 
Dante’s is a poem of the Schools, it may be. 
Perhaps one could date or place it by the reading 
of a single canto. But it is final and con- 
summate. There had never been such a poem 
before, and never would be such another. 

In the age which that great poem ushered in 
faith so absolute and vision so precise could not 
hope to endure. Neither Petrarch nor Boc- 
caccio did more than acquiesce; nor should we 
look for more in Chaucer than lip-service to the 


Immortality in the Poets 209 


implications of man’s immortality. So much 
was his duty as a Christian or an ordinary man; 
it was as much as you could expect from a 
fourteenth century poet in his prime. It is true 
that he rounds off the Canterbury Tales with the 
Parson: ‘“‘Thanne shal men understonde what 
is the fruyt of pennance; and, after the word of 
Jhesu Crist, it is the endelees blisse of hevene’’; 
equally true that he makes formal “Retrac- 
cioun”’ of those of the Tales “that sownen in to 
synne.” It is not for such pious measures that 
we love Chaucer. They are of the same mint 
as the decent doxology which ended every poem 
of the time, which even Boccaccio did not always 
forget, of which even Villon, “at the instance of 
his mother,” made a refrain: 


En ceste foy je vueil vivre et mourir. 


Chaucer, as a matter of fact, used Christian 
doctrine with all other learning sacred and pro- 
fane as so much poetical grist. At the end of 
Troilus and Criseyde he borrows from the Para- 
diso, to enhance the death of the Trojan prince, 
that very figure which I quoted—that of seeing 
the dusty world from a height: 


And whan that he was slayn in this manere 
His lighte goost ful blisfully is went 
Up to the holwnesse of the eighté spere, 


210 Immortality 


In convers leting everich element: 

And ther he saugh with ful avisement 
Th’erratik sterrés, herknyng armonye 
With sounés fulle of hevennish melodye. 


And down from thennés faste he gan avise 
This litel spot of erthe that with the see 
Enbracéd is, and fully gan despise 

This wrecched world, and held al vanité 
To réspect of the pleyne felicité 

That is in hevene above. .... 


So far he follows the twenty-second, Paradiso, 
but goes on to make a fine use of it when he 
describes the soul of Troilus looking down at its 
discarded body, and laughing at those “that 
wepen for his deth so faste.”” It is reasoning as a 
Christian, for all that it is light-hearted reasoning. 

The pococurantism of the Middle Ages, how- 
ever, experienced sharp reactions. Death was 
close at hand; War slew its thousands, plague 
its tens of thousands. On some sudden wave of 
terror blown overland by the preachers whole 
townships turned flagellant and the Pilgrimage 
churches would be beset. Temor mortis contur- 
bat me: the people recovered their faith which 
otherwise they were apt to hold by them, stored 
like a remedy in the medicine cupboard. ‘Now 
I, to comfort him, bid him ’a should not think 
of God. I hoped there was no need to trouble 
himself with any such thoughts yet.’ So did 


Immortality in the Poets 211 


Mistress Quickly when Sir John lay on sick 
bed; but in the fifteenth century there was 
frequent need to think of God. Langland’s 
Vision is one long exhortation to repentance. 
No large significance can be attached to the 
testimony of Langland, Wyclif or their converts. 
For the general the Faith had been once for all 
delivered; and delivery made, the estate was put 
by for a rainy day. Then came the Renaissance, 
the awakening of curiosity, and the readjustment 
of man’s views of himself, his entourage, his 
liabilities, and his prospects. 

Rabelais need not be called a sceptic because 
he was profane. Profanity is as much a mark 
of the true believer as of the unbeliever, or the 
Italian peasant as he may be observed, taking 
his ease in his church, is not the devout creature 
we believe him. Montaigne “confesses and 
avoids”’ (as the lawyers say) the Christian faith. 
He affirms it, with qualifications which are 
rather implied than declared. His famous dis- 
course upon the book (on Natural Religion) 
of Raymond de Sebonde is designed to base faith 
upon reason, and to diminish the pretensions of 
men. He is scornful of any faith otherwise 
established. “‘Plaisante foy, qui ne croid ce 
qu’elle croid, que pour n’avoir le courage de la 
descroire!”” He refutes the doctrine of the 
soul’s pre-existence, and can find little to say of 


212 Immortality 


transmigration but that the notion is “ plaisante.”’ 
As for a future life, ““Confessons Ingenuement 
que Dieu seul nous I’a dict, et la foy. Car lecon 
n’est-ce pas de nature et de nostre raison.” 
Just as Rabelais had reclaimed the liberty of 
laughter, so Montaigne that of enquiry. Shake- 
speare followed them there. 

Whether Shakespeare doubted the immortal- 
ity of the soul is a question I am not able to 
answer with confidence. A very positive little 
Inquiry into the Philosophy and Religion of 
Shakespeare, by W. J. Birch, M.A., published 
in 1848, held it for certain that the poet was both 
sceptic and scoffer. Dr. Johnson, too, did not at 
all approve of his theology. No doubt he was a 
Protestant in the sense that he refused Catholic- 
ism; but there is practically nothing in the plays 
to prove him a Christian. It is a question 
whether there need, or could, have been. His 
work is much more dramatic than classic drama 
ever was. No Chorus proclaims average opin- 
ion, or opinion which can be held as his own, on 
his scene. It is true that he puts into the 
mouths of Christians—Richard IT, Angelo, Ham- 
let—judgments of mortality which no Christian 
could consciously hold; and it is not easy to 
explain that except by suggesting that he wished 
to secure the assent of his audience. I do not 
think we need avoid the reflection that, in 


Immortality in the Poets 213 


Shakespeare’s age, current thought upon Im- 
mortality was crystallised, and what is called a 
“pious opinion.” The world was wider than it 
had been, and as full of tongues as Rumour. 
The authority of the universal Church had been 
weakened, the authority of the infallible Bible 
not yet established. That which to Dante 
had been a matter of vision, to Chaucer of devout 
acquiescence, was to Shakespeare one view 
among many of the dedal earth. If Macbeth 
could “‘jump the life to come,” if to Hamlet the — 
“rest”? were silence, we may be sure that it 
was quite safe to say so upon the Elizabethan 
theatre. Against these sayings may be set 
Henry the Fifth’s “Tarry, sweet soul,’ and 
Laertes,’ 
I tell thee, churlish priest, 


A ministering angel shall she be, 
While thou liest howling— 


rhetorical figures though they be. It is not here 
a question of Christianity—Shakespeare never 
professed that faith so openly as in his will; and 
his will was common form—it is a question of 
belief in Immortality. The plays do not— 
perhaps cannot—prove that Shakespeare 
thought there was anything worth having after 
death. More significantly, the Sonnets do not 
prove it either. Sonnet VI: 


214 Immortality 


Be not self-will’d, for thou art much too fair 
To be Death’s conquest, and make worms thine heir, 


does not point beyond the grave. Sonnet XVIII 
promises a highly qualified hereafter: 


So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, 
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. 


Sonnet LX XIV shall be given entire: 


But be contented: when that fell arrest 
Without all bail shall carry me away, 

My life hath in this line some interest, 
Which for memorial still with me shall stay. 
When thou receivest this, thou dost review 
The very part was consecrate to thee: 

The earth can have but earth, which is his due; 
My spirit is thine, the better part of me. 

So then, thou hast but lost the dregs of life, 
The prey of worms, my body being dead; 
The coward conquest of a wretch’s knife, 
Too base of thee to be rememberéd. 

The worth of that is that which it contains, 
Aad that is this, and this with thee remains. 


I began this essay by reminding the reader that 
the poet could not easily disassociate himself 
from his script, and in its immortality might be 
content to find his own. I take that to have 
been the case for Shakespeare, to whom the 
world was less a stage than an inn. The guests 


Immortality in the Poets 215 


came and went, ate, drank, ruffled, made merry, 
and paid the reckoning. Quietly he sat by, 
looking on, knowing all about the springs of their 
bustling, fervid commerce, concerning himself 
scarcely at all with their fate beyond the door. 
Maestro di colo che sanno, reader of the hearts 
of men! But he did not care to look beyond 
the “flaming ramparts of the world.” He was 
a poet, not a bard; a reader, not a seer. 

Where Shakespeare would not question, or, 
rather, do more than question, Spenser, the 
Platonist, was bold to affirm. His four fine 
hymns testify to his faith both in the pre-exist- 
ence from eternity and final reassumption of the 
soul. 


For when the soule, the which derived was, 

At first, out of that great immortal Spright, 

By whom all live to love, whilome did pass 
Downe from the top of purest heaven’s hight 
To be embodied here, it then tooke light 

And lively spirits from that fayrest starre 
Which lights the world forth from his firie carre. 


And the beauty of this visible world is but a copy 
of the other: 


So every spirit, as it is most pure, 
And hath in it the more of heavenly light, 
So it the fairer bodie doth procure 


216 Immortality 


To habit in, and it more fairely dight 

With cheareful grace and amiable sight; 

For of the soule the bodie forme doth take; 
For soule is forme, and doth the bodie make. 


Sheer Plato, all that; and the thought need not 
be disdained of them who follow the Gospel 
according to Saint John. Through the genera- 
tions after Spenser, those of Ben Jonson and the 
neo-pagans, the Christian lamp, whether fed by 
the Phedrus or with the pure chrism of the old 
faith—the purer indeed for its late tribulations— 
was kept alight. It throws a mild beam from 
George Herbert: 


**Call in thy death’s head there: tie up thy fears. 

He that forbears 

To suit and serve his need, 
Deserves his load.” 

But as I raved and grew more fierce and wild 
At every word, 

Methought I heard one calling “‘ Child!” 
And I replied, “‘My Lord!” 


It is full-fed, and sometimes garish, in Crashaw 
—as when he tells St. Teresa, 


Thou shalt look round about, and see 

Thousands of crown’d souls throng to be 
Themselves thy crown: sons of thy vows, 

The virgin-births with which thy sovereign spouse 
Made fruitful thy fair soul. Go now 

And with them all about thee, bow 


Immortality in the Poets 217 


To Him: “put on (He’ll say) put on 
(My rosy love) that thy rich zone 
Sparkling with the sacred flames 
Of thousand souls, whose happy names 
Heaven keep upon thy score”... 

and so 
Thou with the Lamb, thy Lord, shalt go. 
And wheresoe’er he sets His white 
Steps, walk with Him those ways of light, 
Which who in death would live to see, 
Must learn in life to die, like thee. 


Burning rhetoric indeed, inspired by the very 
ecstasy of vision, if, (as I think) rendering rather 
ecstasy than vision. Crashaw is no reasoner, 
but a God-fraught mystic. Henry Vaughan 
must be put beside him, with his curious antici- 
pation of Wordsworth’s great Ode. He calls it 
“The Return”’: 


Happy those early days, when I 
Shined in my angel-infancy ... 
When yet I had not walk’d above 

A mile or two from my first Love, 
And looking back, at that short space 
Could see a glimpse of His bright face... 
Before I taught my tongue to wound 
My conscience with a sinful sound, 
Or had the black art to dispense 

A several sin to every sense, 

But felt through all this fleshly dress 
Bright shoots of everlastingness. 


218 Immortality 
Vaughan, too, could be rapt into beatific vision: 


I saw eternity the other night, 
Like a great ring of pure and endless light, 
All calm, as it was bright. 


And so we come to Milton and his justification of 
the ways of God. 

Milton, though he was a Puritan, was a 
Humanist as well. He was the most learned of 
our poets; and it may be his learning which gives 
to Paradise Lost its air of argument, of being a 
**brief,’’ and to the reader the feeling that heart 
is not so much engaged as brain in it. It is 
cloudy and magniloquent where the Divina 
Commedia is crystal clear: remarkable that 
Dante’s faith has taught him precision of epithet 
and qualification, and that Milton’s ratiocination 
has had upon his poem the opposite effect. 
Nobody can doubt that he held to the Immor- 
tality of Man. Yet his strongest plea for 
the personality of God is to be had out of his 
firm conviction of that of Satan. There are but 
two human characters in the poem, of whom one, 
Eve, is beautifully and wisely touched. None 
of the heavenly or infernal hosts is clear, except 
Satan, whose presentment is a masterpiece. 
The Godhead is veiled in a cloud of sublimity 
such as Milton only of men could gather. I 


Immortality in the Poets 219 


cannot imagine a heathen closing Paradise Lost 
convinced of his immortal essence, nor a Chris- 
tian the more grounded in his faith; but assuredly 
no man with a relish for poetry could read it 
through without extraordinary elation and en- 
largement of mind. If it lacks the conviction in 
the writer which is the driving power of the 
Divine Comedy to win from the reader the sense 
of inevitability, of “thus and thus” it was and 
must have been, it is because Milton himself 
lacked the vision which Dante had. 

The Apostolate of John Wesley broke up 
eighteenth century opinion which before his time 
had declined largely into deism. From deism 
into indifferentism is not a long stage. A vigor- 
ous morality can consist with either; and that is 
what we get from such poets as Pope, who was a 
Catholic, from Gray who was a Gallio, from 
Johnson who was orthodox. When Swift was 
made Dean of St. Patrick’s the epigram went 
about, 


A deanery he has won ai last 

By means most strange and odd; 
And might a bishop be in time, 
If he’d believe in God. 


Swift’s sermons are as purely ethical as Sterne’s, 
and may have no better sanction; his verse is not 
remarkable for its piety. Those, on the other 


220 Immortality 


hand, on whose lips Wesley had laid the live 
coal thought dreadfully of Immortality, and lost 
their apprehension of everlasting bliss in their 
dread of its opposite. Cowper is a standing 
example. He was literally terrified out of his 
wits, the gentlest soul ever lodged in frail body. 
To such strange uses may our musing upon high 
things bring us that Cowper, who would have 
died if he had been conscious of such a state of 
mind, was actually in little better case than the 
pagan Catullus: 


Soles occidere et redire possunt: 
nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux, 
nox est perpetua una dormienda! 


And Cowper loathed to live, yet feared to die. Be- 
fore his spirit could be set free a new age was born. 

Wordsworth the pantheist (as he was through- 
out the years of his mspiration) was a more 
certain voice than the orthodox, conforming 
moralist of his later years. The Ode is a mag- 
nificent poem, illuminating and suggestive, but 
whether it pronounces for the personal Immortal- 
ity in which Dante believed, or a reabsorption in 
“God who is our home,” I should not venture to 
say: 


Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie 
Thy soul’s immensity; 


Immortality in the Poets 221 


Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep 
Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind, . 
That, deaf and silent, read’st the eternal deep, 
Haunted for ever by the eternal mind... . 


Certainly, the more you enhance the soul’s 
immensity, the more you extenuate the hopes of 
an enduring personality. While it may be true 
that 


in a season of calm weather 
Though inland far we be 
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea 
Which brought us hither, 
Can in a moment travel thither, 
And see the Children sport upon the shore, 
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore— 


the chances, to the poet’s mind, seemed to point 
to our being utterly engulfed in that sea of 
Being, which has been the belief and consolation 
of all mystics from the first to the last—but not 
of the generality of men. They see little differ- 
ence between the rounding of a little life by a 
sleep and its emptying into God. Difference 
there may be, but not enough to build upon. 

Yet no greater promise has been held out to us 
through our poets since Wordsworth. Browning 
and Tennyson were optimists by temperament 
and eclectics in philosophy. They had the 
testimony of ages behind them, and the world 


222 Immortality 


mapped out before them, “where to choose.” 
Neither of them doubted of Immortality, but 
neither ventured more than generalities upon it. 
Tennyson reduced his “obstinate questionings”’ 
to accord with Wordsworth’s answer: 


My own dim life should teach me this, 
That life shall live for ever more 
Else earth is darkness at the core, 

And dust and ashes all that is. 


Reason assures the elegist by a reductio ad ab- 
surdum yet the question returns: 


How fares it with the happy dead? 


And hope serves for an answer: 


Oh yet we trust that somehow good 
Will be the final goal of ill. . . . 


Finally, 


I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope, 
And gather dust and chaff, and call 
To what I feel is Lord of all, 

And faintly trust the larger hope. 


The “larger hope”’ led him further towards pan- 
theism as he grew older. Browning’s Rabbi 
ben Ezra believed himself, “‘a god though in the 
germ,” and “ Easter Day’’ ends, 


Immortality in the Poets 223 


Christ rises! Mercy every way 
Is infinite,—and who can say? 


Who indeed of us, if not the poet? 

A faith, which can only be expressed in a 
sighed question, is not one to sustain the many; 
but such as it is the poets of our day cannot 
better it. Of the only living poets whose gifts 
and attainments are comparable with those of 
our prime, one is a Stoic, the other an Epicurean. 
The Poet-Laureate musing on a dead child: 


So quiet! doth the change content thee?—Death, whither 
hath he taken thee? 
To a world, do I think, that rights the disaster of this? 
The vision of which I miss, 
Who weep for the body, and wish but to warm thee and 
waken thee? 


Though the vision fail him, conscience never will, 
nor pity, nor gentleness. For Mr. Housman, 
night is the end, and day all too short. Life 
appears as a mauvarse plaisanterie. “‘Pauvre et 
triste humanité.” That is where we are at 
present. 

The sum of it all is that the poet voices, does 
not lead, his age. If he voices with conviction, 
distinction or force, a following may be gained 
for his utterance in a generation later than his 
own. As for him, he is not a teacher, and no 


224 Immortality 


more of a prophet than the rest of us. He is a 
conduit-pipe for the Spirit, perhaps: 


To mi son’ un’ che quando 
Amor mi spira, noto, ed a quel’ modo 
V’é detta dentro vo significando. 


But who has believed his report? Those among 
the tongue-tied who know as much as he does. 


ff Selection from the 
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Bose 
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The Control 
of Parenthood 


By 
Prof. J. ArtHuR Tuomson, M.A., LL.D. 
Prof. Leonarp Hitt, M.D., F.R.S. 

The Very Rev. Dran Inagx, C.V.O., D.D. 
Mr. Haroutp Cox (Editor, Edinburgh Review) 
Dr. Mary Scuaruies, C.B.E., M.D., M.S. 
Sir Riper Haacarp, K.B.E. 

Rev. Principal A. E. Garviz, M.A., D.D. 
Rev. F. B. Meyer, B.A., D.D. 

Dr. Marie Stopgs, D.Sc., Ph.D., F.L.S. 


Introduction by 
Tue BisHor oF BIRMINGHAM 


Edited by 
JAMES Marcuant, C.B.E., LL.D., F.LS., 
F.R.S.Ed. 


Secretary of the National Birthrate Commission, ete. 


In this book a distinguished group of scientists, 
economists, and leaders of religious thought, give their 
frank opinions on the reduction of population and 
birth control. The arguments for and against the so- 
called ‘‘natural” and the so-called ‘‘artificial’? methods 
are carefully considered, and the whole problem with 
all its perplexities and difficulties is resolutely faced. 

It is hoped that the work will help to make the public 
realize the danger of longer ignoring these questions 
which vitally concern the welfare of the race. 


G. P. Putnam’s Sons 
New York London 





The Mind in Action 


A Study of Human Interests 


By 


George H. Green 


Author of ‘‘ Psychanalysis in the Class Room,”’’ etc. 


Since the advent of scientific method into 
the mental philosophies, the field of psycho- 
logy has been enlarged, defined, and redivided. 
With the completion of the cycle, laymen as 
well as scholars have sensed a certain futility 
in the process, which seems to typify the 
eternal recurrence of things. And along with 
all definite, positive progress in the field 
have appeared schisms; ‘‘ behaviorism,” 
mystical dualism, confusion, complications, 
‘* complexes.” 

In this book Dr. Green proceeds from a 
background of fundamentals and with an 
intimate knowledge of the contemporary psy- 
chological milieu, into a close and consistent 
exposition of ‘the mind in action.” 


G. P. Putnam’s Sons 
New York London 





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